EDITORIAL: The single-use plastics boondoggle

The federal government’s decision to suspend a ban on exporting single-use plastics that was supposed to take effect on Dec. 20 makes sense.

It argues that the $35-billion-a-year Canadian plastics industry has been hard hit by tariffs and supply chain issues, and that the economic costs of imposing the ban outweigh negligible environmental benefits.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government is embarking on a 70-day consultation period to decide on the next steps.

But what has never made sense is the government’s ban on the domestic use of single-use plastics — grocery bags, cutlery, takeout containers, stir sticks, six-pack ring carriers and most plastic straws — which began in 2022 and continues to this day.

When former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government implemented this policy, it was a classic case of pointless virtue signalling.

Its own impact analysis at the time concluded it would almost double the amount of garbage entering the waste stream to 2.9 million tonnes between 2023 and 2032 because of the use of substitutes such as paper, wood, moulded fibre, aluminum and alternative plastics.

It is estimated that the net cost to taxpayers would be $1.4 billion because the alternatives were typically more expensive than plastic.

The six categories of single-use plastics subject to the ban accounted for an estimated 160,000 tonnes of plastic waste annually — just 5% of the overall amount of 3.3 million tonnes of plastic waste.

Of that, 86% ended up in landfills, 4% was burned, a dismal 9% recycled — so much for all those years of blue box recycling — and only about 1%, or 29,000 tonnes, was being discharged into the environment as litter, with 2,500 tonnes ending up in oceans, lakes and rivers.

Since only about 1% of Canada’s physical plastic waste escaped into the environment, Canada was not a major contributor to the global problem of plastic pollution.

The far greater problem was Canada exporting plastic waste to foreign countries, ostensibly for environmentally responsible waste disposal, but in fact often using Third World countries as dumping grounds for plastics, with a far greater chance of it ending up in the world’s waterways.

Basically, the government’s ban on single-use plastics created more problems than it solved because in the rush to “do something” about plastic pollution, the policy it seized upon made no sense.