Despite its efforts, the Government of Canada does not know if it will really succeed in eliminating, as promised by 2030, the sending to landfills, or the abandonment in nature, of the four million tonnes of plastic waste produced in country every year.
Canada’s Environmental Commissioner Jerry V. DeMarco on Tuesday released a critique of Canada’s strategy called “zero plastic waste by 2030.” Despite its name, the initiative does not measure the progress made towards its long-term target, namely the elimination of this waste, when in theory there are only six years left on the clock.
His report comes, by chance, on the last day of negotiations in Ottawa for a global treaty on plastic pollution, for which countries have not been able to agree on a ceiling on plastic production.
The department tasked in 2019 with coordinating the ambitious task of addressing Canada’s plastic pollution problem is Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). However, its reports are content to monitor its modest reduction objectives from one year to the next.
In 2022, its efforts would have succeeded in diverting 325 tonnes of plastic from landfills or the environment, more than its objective of 300 tonnes. However, these hundreds of tonnes only represent less than 0.01% of the total weight of plastics that Canadians throw in the garbage, or leave in the environment, each year.
“Even if the name of the horizontal initiative specified “zero” plastic waste […]the initiative’s targets only mentioned a “reduction” and a “downward trend”, were not assessed against the ultimate goal of zero plastic waste and did not define any path to follow to achieve this objective,” writes Commissioner DeMarco, an employee of the Office of the Auditor General of Canada.
Around 70% of plastics in circulation end up in garbage, and it is estimated that Canada increased the volume of this waste by 15% between 2012 and 2018, going from 3.5 to 4 million tonnes annually.
Necessary objective
The government’s plan is, ultimately, to repair, reuse, recondition or recycle all plastic already in circulation. This is an “ambitious” objective, agrees the commissioner, but monitoring this long-term objective is important since plastic pollution has well-documented harmful effects on wildlife and habitats, both on land than at sea. Since plastic also contaminates the food chain, this form of pollution is also raising increasing concerns for human health.
Unfortunately, the Government of Canada only has incomplete estimates of the extent of the problem, which are also released years late. Result: decision-makers do not know if they are really on the right track to truly end plastic in landfills, incinerators, forests and oceans.
For example, the next Statistics Canada report on plastic is expected in March 2024, but its data will end in 2020. At this rate, we would have to wait until 2034 to know whether the 2030 reduction target has been achieved or missed. In addition, Environment and Climate Change Canada must still create a federal plastics registry in order to standardize data.
The portrait painted by the Environment Commissioner of the “zero plastic waste by 2030” objective, a mixed strategy involving both the federal government and the provinces, is not entirely negative. He cites several good moves and certain progress made by the government. For example, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has successfully removed enough abandoned, lost or discarded (“ghost”) fishing gear from the waters to achieve its objectives.
Canada’s Environment Commissioner also published four other reports on Tuesday, in which he notably paints a bleak picture of the management of abandoned contaminated mining sites in the North, as well as a failure of the Net Accelerator initiative. zero, which fails to encourage high-emission manufacturing industries to decarbonize their activities.