Unfortunately, anti-plastic hysteria is not driven by facts. Virtue-signalling has very real costs:
"Plastic’s unique properties of flexibility, durability, impermeability, sterility and non-conductivity have made it ubiquitously useful. Even better, it’s inexpensive and lightweight. Between 1950 and 2015, worldwide production of plastic items of all kinds grew at an average annual compound rate of 8.4 percent – two-and-a-half times the growth rate of global GDP. During this time, the world has experienced tremendous advances in medical devices, appliances, plumbing, electrical and other building systems, furniture, packaging, food storage and on and on. All due to the myriad benefits of plastic. Plastic bags replaced paper bags at the check-out counter because they’re cheaper, lighter and more durable. Synthetic outerwear has largely replaced less practical wool and cotton. Cars are more fuel-efficient because plastic has replaced heavier metal parts. Even Canada’s paper money has been supplanted by long-lasting polymer bank notes. And today, 3-D printing holds the promise of many more plastic revolutions to come. Ours has been the Age of Plastics.
Until now...
Citing a global ocean pollution crisis, federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault announced that six disposable plastic products will be prohibited by the end of this year: retail carryout bags, cutlery, food service containers, six-pack ring carriers, stir sticks and straws. “We promised Canadians we would deliver a ban on single-use plastics,” Guilbeault said at the time. “By the end of the year, you won’t be able to manufacture or import these harmful products.” Guilbeault’s characterization of plastic as “harmful” signals a clear break in how we are meant to regard this inert, sanitary and infinitely malleable material. Beware.
The federal Liberals’ policy has been widely cheered across the environmental movement...
While it may seem a dramatic move to outlaw familiar and useful plastic grocery store bags, straws and cutlery, King notes approvingly that the looming ban is only the first stage in a much grander federal strategy to achieve zero plastic waste by 2030. “We want to see an expanded ban list,” she declares. “We want to see a phasing down of all plastic production. We want to see caps and production targets. We need to be moving out of the plastics era altogether.”
As eager proponents such as Guilbeault and King tell it, Canada’s anti-plastic campaign is built on a solid foundation of scientific and documentary evidence. In addition to frightening factoids such as King’s 3 million tonnes of annual plastic waste, the government’s June 20, 2022 press release offered a lengthy list of backgrounders, consultations, studies and guides, including a “Science assessment of plastic pollution,” “A proposed integrated management approach to plastic products to prevent waste and pollution” and a “Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement.” All this may seem authoritative on the basis of volume alone. However, a close reading of these documents reveals many surprising and unexpected facts in direct contradiction to the official narrative that Canada will be a better place without so much plastic in our lives.
Delving into the details reveals that eliminating plastic bags, straws, cutlery and so on will do nothing to redress global ocean pollution. It will have an equally negligible effect on terrestrial pollution within Canada. Where it will have a major impact is on your wallet. The replacement of inexpensive plastic items with pricier alternatives will needlessly push up prices for everything from restaurant meals to hotel rooms to basic groceries at time when inflation is rampant. It will also punish many Canadian manufacturers, sending the work they once did overseas. Finally, and most devastatingly – given the Trudeau government’s seeming obsession with fighting climate change – the government itself admits the impending prohibitions will actually increase greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. They will also cause other identifiably negative outcomes, including a greater overall volume of garbage, lower air quality and increased deforestation.
By nearly every metric, and according to the federal government’s own published evidence, the single-use plastics ban is set to make almost everything worse...
The federal “Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement” cites numerous sources supporting the allegation that throw-away plastics have an outsized impact on pollution in Canada and around the world. Among the evidence is Ocean Wise Shoreline Cleanup, a volunteer campaign that collects and categorizes litter found on international shorelines. Curiously, however, Ocean Wise’s latest Canadian evidence does little to implicate the six banned items. The number-one shoreline garbage item – by a huge margin – is cigarette butts. The “harmful” six aren’t even among the top five garbage culprits (the other four being plastic pieces, Styrofoam, food wrappers and bottle caps). Plastic bags and straws come eighth and ninth, respectively, and account for a mere 6.5 percent of the total waste produced by the top dozen listed items. Removing them from circulation will have almost no noticeable impact on Canada’s shores or oceans.
As for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, research published this month in the peer-reviewed journal Nature reveals that “a majority of the floating material stems from fishing activities.” This is mostly fishing nets, buoys, tackle and rope. Further, “Most floating plastics in the North Pacific subtropical gyre can be traced back to five industrialized fishing nations.” Those countries are Japan, China, South Korea, the United States and Taiwan. Canada is not on the list. A recent report by the Fraser Institute calculates that Canada contributes between 0.02 percent and 0.03 percent to total global aquatic plastic pollution. “Canada’s actual discharge of plastics into the oceans is trivial,” says author Kenneth P. Green in an interview. “It’s a complete non-issue.”
The story on land is much the same as on water. While plastic bags, straws and food-service containers are often top-of-mind in litter discussions, the facts tell a different story. Toronto, for example, regularly audits litter on random plots of city land. The most recent data from 2020 show that the overall amount of garbage on city streets has declined significantly over the past two decades. Further, none of the soon-to-be-banned plastic items are among the five most common types of large litter found at street level. Straws are seventh, behind napkins, cigarette packaging, coffee cup lids, miscellaneous plastic pieces, newspapers and store receipts. The same holds for small litter, with single-use plastic cutlery comprising a minuscule 0.5 percent of the survey results.
A comprehensive analysis of Canada’s plastics industry by consulting firm Deloitte concluded that plastic in all forms poses no large-scale threat to the country’s landscape. While Greenpeace’s King is correct that Canada discards 3.2 million tonnes of plastic per year, almost all of it finds its way to an appropriate destination. Nearly 2.8 million tonnes, or 86 percent of annual plastic production, is safely landfilled. A further 9 percent is recycled, as King also noted. Four percent is burned for energy. That leaves less than 1 percent, or 29,000 tonnes, that appears to be improperly discarded as litter. This is consistent with the Toronto litter survey’s findings.
It is, of course, a worthy goal to seek to reduce those 29,000 tonnes of plastic waste to an even smaller amount. The same goes for boosting recycling rates. But the scale of the plastic litter problem in Canada is hardly of the crisis variety. Very little of Canada’s plastic waste escapes proper disposal. And what tiny amount does leave our borders represents an immaterial component of global ocean pollution.
If banning single-use plastics will have no meaningful impact on litter or ocean garbage, what explains the Trudeau government’s great enthusiasm for such a policy? Waste management is a local and provincial issue, and there’s ample evidence that municipalities and provinces are already taking action on plastics. All provinces, in fact, have implemented some form of extended producer responsibility or enhanced recycling mandates. It’s not as if other levels of government have been ignoring the topic.
One clue to understanding the Liberals’ anti-plastic crusade may be found in how Greenpeace’s King characterizes plastics as harmful because “they are derived from fossil fuels.” She also refers to “Big Plastic and Big Oil” as joint enemies arrayed against her organization’s brave fight to rid the world of plastic bags and other accoutrements of modern life.
“At its core, this is essentially an anti-fossil fuel agenda,” observes Green. “Because plastics are derived from the oil and gas industry – fossil fuels made solid, so to speak – they are considered the fruit of a poisoned tree by environmental groups. It is a holy issue.” Such religious imagery goes a long way in explaining the fervour of the federal government’s campaign: it is based on a belief that seems impervious to evidence or logic.
The lack of any federal responsibility over waste management was an obstacle the Trudeau government had to overcome in order to insert itself into the plastics debate. This was accomplished in April 2021 when the Liberals controversially added “plastic manufactured items” to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act’s (CEPA) list of toxic substances. By ministerial fiat, Ottawa shifted plastic waste from a garbage problem to a direct threat to human and wildlife health. Thus, a federal mandate was born. Of course, this now means that anything made from plastic – from heart valves to the handle on your suitcase – shares space on a list with asbestos, lead, mercury and numerous tongue-twisting chemical compounds including Dibenzo-para-dioxin and Tributyltetradecylphosphonium chloride.
For this toxic transformation, the government relied on the 2020 Environment Canada report “Science assessment of plastic pollution.” Given the significance of the claim that all manufactured plastics pose a direct threat to humankind, one might expect an exhaustive and authoritative report. Not quite. As this document itself admits, it “is not intended to quantify the risks of plastic pollution on the environment or human health.” Rather, it is merely a survey of other claims made against plastic by various organizations and researchers. A literature review, if you will. And it comes to no firm conclusion, instead identifying five “key knowledge gaps” that require further study. Nonetheless, Guilbeault seized on it as all the proof he needed to take dramatic action against plastics.
There is a huge evidentiary gap between the federal government’s impetuous declaration of plastics as a deadly material and the scrupulous and time-consuming process entailed in assessing other allegedly toxic substances by other arms of the federal government. The Pest Management Regulatory Agency’s assessment of pesticides, for example, includes detailed commissioned laboratory studies for proposed new pesticides in the agricultural industry, as well as a painstaking review and complaint process for already-approved chemicals. Nothing like this was performed on plastics, despite the far broader implications.
A group of plastics industry firms called the Responsible Plastic Use Coalition (RPUC) has challenged the government’s toxic gambit with a lawsuit filed this summer, seeking to overturn or delay the ban. According to RPUC’s statement of claim, the federal government has “not established that the single-use plastics are ‘toxic.’ In fact, there is no credible evidence that any of the single-use plastics are ‘toxic.’ Accordingly, the Ban cannot be justified.” In an earlier legal filing, RPUC noted that “The lack of science-based decision making…is a critical issue” that must be addressed by the courts.“This is a waste management issue, not a toxic issue,” asserts Steve Barkel, lead plaintiff in the RPUC lawsuit and vice president of Petro Plastics Inc., an Ontario-based plastic bag manufacturer. “If plastic manufactured items really were toxic, why do we brush our teeth with plastic toothbrushes?” Barkel asks pointedly in an interview. “Why is plastic okay for bread bags? Why are we eating yogurt out of plastic tubs?” The RPUC lawsuit argues that plastic is the only entry on CEPA’s list of deadly substances that earns its status due to the shape and particular use for which it is intended, rather than to any constituent danger posed by the material itself...
The economic consequences of declaring some single-use plastic items toxic are far from trivial...
Whatever non-plastic replacements he offers his clientele will come from China or Vietnam. “The government is exporting jobs overseas because of this legislation,” Barkel says. “Some of my competitors have already closed their doors.”
Whatever he pivots to will inevitably cost consumers more. Barkel explains that standard plastic grocery store bags cost about 4¢ each and weigh 8 grams. Paper bags wholesale for about 15¢ and weigh 55 grams, while reusable fabric bags can cost up to a dollar each and weigh about the same as paper. Beyond the obvious and unnecessary cost hike, all that extra weight and bulk presents another huge problem. “I can get 2.4 million plastic bags into one transport truck,” Barkel says. “To move the same number of paper bags takes roughly seventeen truckloads. You tell me, what’s better for the environment?”
Barkel and other bag manufacturers tried to convince Ottawa to approve a thicker, reusable plastic shopping bag made from 40 percent recycled material under its ban policy. Barkel calls this “Bag 125” because it can survive 125 uses; once it breaks, it can be recycled back into another plastic bag. Trend-setting California allows this kind of bag within its single-use plastic bag ban. Such is the Liberal government’s animosity towards plastic, however, that even this sensible proposal was vetoed. For similar reasons, Ottawa has also rejected compostable plastic bags. The federal position is apparently that all plastic is bad. Full stop. As a result, Barkel says, “Canada is forcing consumers to use fabric bags that come from China and are 100 percent non-recyclable. When they break, you’ll have to put them in a landfill.”
The existential crisis facing Barkel is not unique to the plastics industry. By raising costs and burdening owners with Byzantine new rules and regulations, the ban is also threatening the livelihoods of many other small businesses across numerous sectors.
Earlier this year, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) surveyed its members on the expected costs of the single-use plastics ban. The average response: $6,600 per business in the first year alone, or $1.9 billion across Canada’s small business community. It’s hardly the recipe for a robust economic recovery. “A lot of owners took on huge debt loads as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns, and revenues are still low. It would be wise not to add any additional costs at this time,” says Jasmin Guénette, the CFIB’s vice president of national affairs. The CFIB, says Guénette, is asking Ottawa to delay the ban for a couple of years “until businesses can get back to normal levels.”...
There’s little evidence Ottawa is listening. In its recently released “Guidance for Selecting Alternatives to Single-use Plastics,”
the federal government purports to offer advice to businesses
struggling with the ban’s implications. It’s about as useful as a paper
straw. For restaurant owners unhappy with the high cost or poor utility
of non-plastic disposable forks and knives, the guide suggests they
simply change their menus: “Businesses could…consider providing more
meal options that do not require the use of cutlery (e.g. wraps and
sandwiches).” Ottawa’s solution, the Fraser Institute’s Green cracks, is
for “everyone to eat with their fingers.”
Ottawa’s handling of straws generates a further sense of the absurd. Not only are these colourful sipping tubes enjoyed by people of all ages for everything from milk shakes to cocktails, the flexible variety is also a necessity for people with disabilities that cause them to have difficulty swallowing – a fact repeatedly recognized in government documentation. As a result, Ottawa considers plastic straws to be both a deadly toxic substance and a medically-necessary device. It seems a vexing contradiction...
According to federal regulations, stores will be permitted to sell packs of 20 single-use plastic straws, but only if they treat the product in the same sinister manner as cigarettes. No signage is allowed to alert customers that straws are available for purchase, and if a customer happens to ask for straws at a service counter, the package cannot be “displayed in a manner that permits the customers to view the package without the help of a store employee.” Psst. Wanna buy a straw?
The federal government’s own regulatory analysis provides an official calculation of the economic implications of the single-use plastics ban. This cost-benefit study begins by toting up the various ways the ban will cause quantifiable new burdens for consumers, businesses and governments. These costs include extra expenditures by business owners on more-expensive alternative products, as Guénette and Elenis explain. There will also be effects on local governments’ waste management budgets. Plus, there are various and non-trivial administrative, compliance and enforcement costs for governments and businesses. While it discusses the issue of “stranded assets” such as Barkel faces with his soon-to-be-obsolete bag machinery, the government analysis does not calculate a cost for businesses forced to abandon product lines or close altogether.
Where CFIB members estimated their first-year expenditures at $1.9 billion, Ottawa projects these costs of a mere $250 million across the entire economy. This is a big and, so far, unresolved difference. There is less debate, however, regarding the ban’s impact on landfills and other waste management facilities.
As Barkel notes, plastic bags are far lighter than competing products. Landfill expenses tend to be proportionate to weight, and all the proposed substitutes are substantially heavier than the plastic items they replace. While many of these replacements may decompose faster than plastic, they still need more space in the dump. The trade-off between reducing plastic garbage and increasing other forms of garbage seems so stunning that it’s best to let the government report speak for itself:
“The proposed Regulations would prevent approximately 1.6 million tonnes of plastics from entering the waste stream over the analytical period, but would also add about 3.2 million tonnes of other material to the waste stream from the use of substitutes, due to their increased unit weights relative to single-use plastics. This increase in tonnage of waste would represent additional costs for municipalities and provincial authorities.” (Emphasis added.)
To recap, Ottawa’s single-use plastics ban – sold to the public as a necessary blow struck against litter and waste – will create twice as much new garbage as it will save. On this basis alone, it may be the worst garbage reduction policy in history.
All told, the federal cost-benefit analysis projects total costs imposed on consumers and businesses of $1.95 billion over the next ten years. This is obviously a low-end figure, given the CFIB survey suggesting such a sum is likely to be reached in the first year alone, and that the cost of stranded assets and bankrupted businesses are ignored. Additionally, with replacements costing at least twice as much as the original plastic items, the ban will have an immediate impact on prices throughout the hospitality and food sectors at a time when inflation is widely recognized to be this country’s most pressing public policy issue. And it will double the amount of garbage from disposable items.
Now for the benefits. The ban’s main selling point is to reduce litter. As is standard with cost-benefit analysis, the benefit of a cleaner environment must be imputed. This is done by calculating what it would have cost to pick up the amount of plastic garbage saved by the ban, at the rate of $15 per hour per garbage picker. This theoretical process yields an estimated monetary benefit of $619 million over ten years. (Cost-benefit analyses often include estimates for expected lives saved by various policy innovations, such as installing better traffic lighting or lowering speed limits. No such calculation is included in the federal analysis, even though the entire policy is motivated by the claim that the six plastic items are toxic. This is presumably not an oversight.)
As has become standard with all federal Liberal policy analyses, the plastics ban is also run through a “gender-based analysis plus” (GBA+) lens to determine its effects on various identity groups. Here we have more bad news:
“Costs could be felt more acutely by Canadians living with low income and limited disposable income, as the cost of implementing the ban for retailers would likely be passed onto consumers through increased prices for food, beverage, and merchandise. Marginalized communities in Canada are particularly likely to be living with low income due to race, gender, age, and disability status and the intersectionality between these characteristics.”
The GBA+ further reports that “people living with homelessness” often rely on free plastic checkout bags to carry their belongings or to use as rain protection. Then again, the homeless are not the only folks who put disposable plastic items to repeated use. Ample evidence suggests that supposedly single-use plastic bags are widely reused for household litter, sorting or storage. As a result, the prospect of having to purchase boxes of plastic bags for such uses because their free versions have been banned has many consumers fired up on social media.
Taking Ottawa’s figures at face value, the federal cost-benefit analysis yields a net result of -$1.3 billion ($1.95 billion in costs less $619 million in benefits). Such a negative outcome means that, on a strict dollars and cents basis as calculated by the federal bureaucracy itself, the plastics ban is a certifiable failure and should not proceed. “When I first found the government’s impact analysis, I was really surprised,” admits Green. “I thought ‘Wow’ they are straight-up admitting this is a loser of a policy. Its costs clearly exceed its benefits.” Then again, even though the plastics ban “fails on its own merits,” says Green, “they went ahead and did it anyways.”
The most problematic aspect of Ottawa’s single-use plastic policy may be a separate “Strategic Environmental Assessment” that considers the broader non-monetary consequences of abandoning plastic for other products. Here the evidence shows the ban will worsen a wide range of environmental indicators, including Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. For a government that has demonstrated such a singular focus on climate change, it seems a bizarre outcome.
The “Strategic Environmental Assessment” uses a lifecycle approach, looking at the consequences on both the upstream (production of replacements for the banned plastic items) and downstream (consumer and post-consumer effects from using the replacements) results. Numerous negative upstream effects arise due to the fact that producing paper bags or wooden knives is substantially more damaging to the environment than making their plastic counterparts. “Substitutes,” the climate change assessment states, “typically have higher climate change impacts, due to the scale at which single-use plastics are produced, as well as natural resource inputs, electricity sources, and unit weight affecting greenhouse gas emissions during transportation.”
Separate upstream calculations regarding air and water quality, eutrophication (algae production), acidification, deforestation and water use also found “some negative environmental effects.” On the downstream side of the ledger, other than a reduction in various forms of plastic pollution, the only positive indicator comes from an improvement in biodiversity and wildlife health (ie, fewer turtles with straws up their noses).
When asked directly for a response to the broadly adverse outcome of the government’s own lifecycle report, Greenpeace’s King is surprisingly noncommittal. “There are a lot of lifecycle analyses out there and there are often a lot of problems with where the lifecycle starts and whether you are measuring apples or oranges” she shrugs. Rather than quibble over whether paper bags will produce more garbage or air pollution than plastic ones, she’d rather argue for an end to all disposable products. “We shouldn’t even be having this discussion about paper versus plastics,” she says, “We need to find package-free solutions.”
Yet it seems curious that King would be so dismissive of the wide range of expected negative outcomes from an official government source, especially given that such results closely mirror many other equally credible lifecycle studies. The United Nations, for example, is widely regarded to have touched off worldwide plastic antipathy in 2017 when it declared plastic ocean pollution to be a planetary crisis. But in 2020 the UN reviewed existing research on the lifecycle implications of banning plastic bags and concluded, “In the majority of reviewed studies, polyethylene plastic bags [such as Barkel’s proposed Bag 125] were found to have the lowest climate impact.”
As the UN report further reports, “the single-use plastic bag is a poor option in terms of litter on land, marine litter and micro-plastics, but it scores well in other environmental impact categories, such as climate change, acidification, eutrophication, water use and land use.” (Emphasis added.) The real trade-off at the heart of the plastics debate is thus between the aesthetics of plastic waste and the quantifiable harm done by substitutes for those plastic items. And if you happen to weigh actual results over unsightliness, it makes more sense to keep plastic bags and ban the alternatives.
In their eagerness to be seen striking a mighty blow against the modern proliferation of plastic, it seems that the Liberals have confused costs with benefits. “They are going after quite a small environmental problem, that of single-use plastic items seeping into oceans,” says Green. “But the cost of doing so will be high in monetary costs, and high in environmental damage as well. It is a profoundly anti-environmental idea.”
And this, remember, is only the first step. The Trudeau government’s Zero Plastic Waste policy is already committed to imposing even more dramatic restrictions, bans and regulations on plastic use by 2030. Once the six single-use items have been eliminated, the next plastic shoe to drop is likely to be packaging material. Bottles, jugs, bubble wrap, Styrofoam, foam inserts and all the other innovations that make it possible to store liquids, protect your cookies and ship bulky but fragile items such as computers, phones and TVs around the world safely and efficiently may soon be following plastic bags, straws and knives to oblivion.
“In the end,” says Green, “we’ll probably be carrying around all our belongings in wooden buckets. Or clay pots. Maybe they’ll let us use clay pots.” Whatever replaces plastic packaging, we already know it’ll be heavier, more expensive and worse for the environment than what we’re using right now. And this is what the Liberals call progress."
Related:
Federal Court quashes cabinet order underlying single-use plastics ban
"The federal government's ban on plastic straws and grocery bags is in question after the Federal Court ruled on Thursday that Ottawa had overstepped its bounds in designating all "plastic manufactured items" as toxic...
The Liberal cabinet designated plastic manufactured items as toxic in 2021, in order to allow the environment minister to regulate their use in Canada.
In December 2022, the first of those regulations took effect, barring the manufacture and import of six types of single-use plastics, including straws, grocery bags, cutlery, takeout containers, stir sticks and six-pack beverage rings.
The designation was applied to all plastic manufactured items.
In her ruling, Justice Angela Furlanetto noted that evidence shows "thousands" of different items are in that category, and they all have different uses and chemical makeups.
And she said that surely includes some items for which there is no reasonable expectation of environmental harm.
"The broad and all-encompassing nature of the category of (plastic manufactured items) poses a threat to the balance of federalism as it does not restrict regulation to only those (items) that truly have the potential to cause harm to the environment," Furlanetto wrote.
The Canadian Environmental Protection Act defines toxic substances as those that are or may be dangerous to human life or health, that "have or may have" a harmful impact on the environment or biological diversity or that constitute "a danger to the environment on which life depends."
Furlanetto said the government's own report identified several single-use plastic items, including garbage bags, contact lenses and disposable personal care items, that were either not prevalent or were not known to cause environmental harm...
Because the cabinet order that has now been struck down is required to enact the regulations banning some plastic items, those regulations could also now be argued to be improper."
Guilbeault’s plan to ban grocery store meat wrapping, fruit bags - "Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault's department issued a deadline on Wednesday for grocers to provide their feedback on proposed restrictions regarding single-use plastics, such as meat wrapping and fruit bags... Approximately $205 million will be the cost to consumers due to the current ban on plastic six-pack rings and other goods, according to official estimates. “A significant amount of plastic food packaging is used only once and then ends up in landfills,” said Guilbeault. Guilbeault did not give an estimate of how much the new regulations would cost"... According to the staff, there are substitutes available for plastic checkout bags such as paper bags, which cost eight cents each, more expensive than the current plastic bags, which cost three cents each. Currently, consumers use approximately 15.6 billion checkout bags every year. Plastic forks that cost four cents each could be replaced with wooden cutlery that costs nine cents. Instead of using penny straws, switch to paper straws that cost three cents each. Also, replace plastic six-pack rings, which cost three cents each, with cardboard alternatives that cost 34 cents. Staff said “while the unit price of any one single substitute is relatively small” the overall expense multiplied by billions of substitute items was costly."
Food costs are going to rise (not just because of alternative materials, but increased waste). But "corporate greed" is, as usual, a good scapegoat
LAU: Trudeau government's plastic bans will cost Canadians money | Toronto Sun - "Between the plastic straws and the paper, which does the Trudeau government plan to ban? The plastic ones, of course, despite being far cheaper and far better. The paper straws disintegrate easily, are too rigid, and have a disagreeable texture. I know of no one who would affirm that drinking from a paper straw is better than, or even as good as, using a normal plastic one. The plastic straw ban is part of the government’s greenflation agenda — make everything more expensive by forcing everyone to go green, although it’s not clear that banning plastic straws would actually do anything to help the environment. The world’s problems with plastic pollution in oceans, for example, are caused by waste management problems in Asia and elsewhere and have nothing to do with Canadians using plastic straws. Banning straws is only a small part of Ottawa’s greenflation agenda, which also includes carbon taxes, clean fuel regulations, electric vehicle mandates and billions of dollars in various subsidies and programs. Nevertheless, it’s not an immaterial part, especially considering other plastic products will be banned, too... Similarly to the straws, banning other products would also be inflationary. Take, for example, the plastic foam food containers. An U.S. study in 2013 estimated that banning foam food and drink containers would mean a 94 per cent increase in costs to restaurants and their consumers for these containers, even assuming all restaurants switched to the lowest-cost alternative. As with the straws, the 94 per cent figure actually understates the effective inflation, because the lowest-cost alternatives are worse than the plastic — they are less sturdy, do less to keep the food hot and are less reliable. Paying a higher price is inflation, but getting something worse in return is a form of inflation, too, one that sometimes gets missed in the inflation statistics. With the plan to ban plastic foam containers, “greenflation” may again be the wrong word. To be sure, the ban would cause inflation, but whether it’s green is another question. A study from the Independent Institute in California in 2018 concluded that such bans “actually can have negative impacts on the environment” as people substitute paper products for the plastic ones. While plastic products may be worse for the landfill, paper is worse for the environment in other ways. Paper alternatives, the study reported, “often create more waste (by volume and energy use) and cause more air and water pollution.” Manufacturing paper requires mowing down trees, uses more energy than manufacturing plastic, and leaves behind a bigger carbon footprint."
David Clement: Our eco-harmful plastics ban - "Friday afternoons, the start of holiday weekends, Christmas: Ottawa often releases regulatory information at inopportune times, usually to avoid scrutiny, and that’s likely the story for the plastics ban. Despite their unimpeachably green origins and objectives, the draft regulations on single-use plastics would be a huge net negative for the environment, mostly because of the arbitrary nature of what is, and isn’t, considered “single-use.” The draft regulations have four exemptions for when a single-use plastic product is not prohibited. The first is the “hot water test.”... The last and most hilarious exemption is what I call the “black market exemption.” A retailer may offer plastic straws for sale but they are to be stored so customers cannot see them and must be asked for explicitly. But customers must buy them in packs of 20 or more. That’s right, whether you need only one straw or just a few you will have to buy at least 20. So much for curbing waste. Yes, these are actual regulations drafted by the actual government of Canada. And in addition to reading like a Monty Python skit, they very likely would be a net negative for the environment. Because sturdier plastic products can earn exemption from the ban, all that manufacturers need do to comply with the law is produce products using heavier woven plastics. The overall effect may well be to increase the net amount of plastic being produced. Consumers will be faced with a choice between these heavier single-use plastic products that meet the exemption or non-plastic substitutes that are even worse for the environment. These substitutes include paper bags whose production is energy- and resource-intensive — so much so that according to Denmark’s environment ministry, paper bags would each need to be reused 43 times to bring their per-use impact on the environment down to the per-use impact of the single-use plastic bags currently available at Canadian grocery stores. For most people, reusing a paper bag 43 times is virtually impossible. Even worse: when the alternative option is a cotton bag, that number skyrockets to 7,100 uses. A consumer substituting a cotton bag for plastic would need 136 years of weekly grocery store trips to be as environmentally friendly as single-use plastic is. In addition, Ottawa’s own analysis shows that alternatives to single-use plastics currently in use are significantly more expensive... The real problem with our national plastics strategy is that we aren’t pushing for expanding “chemical depolymerization,” otherwise known as advanced recycling... This approach to solving the problem of plastic waste would be in line with Ottawa’s approach of mandating producer responsibility for plastic waste and is something that plastic producers have already expressed interest in expanding. This is especially true for companies who have already made pledges regarding recycled plastic. The Trudeau government could embrace the science that makes these technologies both scalable and sustainable. Rather than endorsing costly and ineffective plastic bans, riddled with exemptions that may only increase plastic waste, we should look to innovators who are offering a third way on plastics. That would be an approach that expands consumer choice while limiting mismanaged waste and protecting the environment."
Canada’s Wasteful Plan to Regulate Plastic Waste - "At the end of 2021, the government of Canada launched a regulatory campaign against plastic waste—Zero-Plastic Waste 2030 (ZPW2030)—that will, in the estimation of its own Regulatory Impact Assessment, impose costs on Canadian society exceeding projected benefits. This fails the first, and arguably most important, test of sound public policy. ZPW2030 will produce little or no environmental benefit because Canada’s plastics economy poses a very small environmental risk either locally or globally. Only one percent of Canada’s plastic wastes are ever released into the environment. The other 99% is disposed off safely from an environmental perspective: some incinerated, some recycled, but most discarded in landfills, an environmentally benign endpoint. Canada’s contribution to global aquatic plastic pollution, when assessed in 2016, was between 0.02% and 0.03% of the global total... Even that small reduction in environmental harm is likely to be offset by increased environmental harms stemming from replacements for the plastic products banned under ZPW2030. As government acknowledges, “the proposed Regulations are expected to increase the waste generated from substitutes by 298,054 tonnes in the first year of full policy stringency (2024) and by around 3.2 million tonnes over the analytical period (2023 to 2032), almost all of which is driven by paper substitutes”. And, the government observes: “The proposed Regulations would prevent approximately 1.6 million tonnes of plastics from entering the waste stream over the analytical period but would also add about 3.2 million tonnes of other materials to the waste stream from the use of substitutes”. The potential for this kind of regulatory “backfire” fails another important test of sound health and environment-related public policy, which is “First, do no harm”. As the government’s Regulatory Impact Analysis shows, the monetized costs of the proposed single-use plastics regulations—CA$1.3 billion—will outstrip the monetized benefits—CA$619 million—by nearly 2:1. According to a report the government contracted Deloitte to produce, over the course of the initiative estimated benefits of the overall ZPW2030 regime are estimated to be up to CA$10.5 billion, but would require investment in new facilities of up to CA$8.3 billion to achieve it. Even then, in 2030, annual costs of the program are estimated to exceed benefits by CA$300 million per year. These costs will ultimately be borne by consumers, as the government observes: the increased volume of wastes discussed above will “represent additional costs for municipalities and provincial authorities, as they are usually responsible for managing collection, transportation, and landfilling of plastic waste, and would assume most of the associated costs, which would ultimately be passed on to taxpayers”... Instead, Canadian policy makers could examine ways to crack down on end-point improper disposal of plastic wastes, such as littering in general. To the extent the federal government is involved with solid waste management, they might look for incentives they could develop to improve street cleaning and municipal waste management and handling practices to prevent littered plastics from lingering in Canada’s environment or leaving its bounds to become part of a global problem."
