Blue surgical mask were aggressively sold to hospitals in the 1960s to replace reusable cotton masks. The shift to this "total disposable system" was sold as a way to reduce hospital labour and infrastructure costs, despite evidence well-made cotton masks might work better, a 2020 article in The Lancet notes.
Stouffer, the marketing guru, was delighted: “You are filling trash cans, the rubbish dumps, the incinerators with literally billions of plastic bottles, plastic jugs, plastic tubs, skin and blister packs, plastic bags and films and sheet packages — and now, even plastic cans,” he boasted to industry leaders in 1963.
But disposability soon fell under attack. Farmers, environmentalists and others infuriated by roadside litter began to point fingers at the plastic industry. Recycling was the manufacturers’ retort — a front that allowed them to shift responsibility for plastic waste onto consumers instead of cutting back on production and profits, explains Liboiron.
Beach Guardian's cleanup activity in Wadebridge, Cornwall, U.K. Photos by Beach Guardian / Greenpeace
“That’s what American environmentalism out of the 1970s was — the individualization of environmental problems to let industry off the hook,” they say. “Recycling is an industry project. Green consumerism is an industry project. It’s not a coincidence that the inculturation of environmentalism happened that way. It’s very American.”
Canadians quickly followed the trend. That storyline remains evident even now. The majority of plastic waste in Canada comes from businesses, institutions and industry, yet most provincial or regional waste management regimes focus on collecting plastic waste from homes.
And activism against all pollution, including plastic, evolved quite differently in other parts of the world, Liboiron points out. For example, Maori land guardians in New Zealand have linked plastic pollution to land and food sovereignty issues and are working to move people towards relying on local, unpackaged food sources, they say.
Hanging onto the recycling myth
Still, in Ottawa today, the idea that recycling is salvation remains prominent, both in the federal government’s plastics plan and on the lips of industry lobbyists.
“Industry agrees that we have a plastic waste matter that needs to be addressed,” says Elena Mantagaris, vice-president for the plastics division of the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada (CIAC), the country’s leading plastics industry lobbying group. “But we believe that it’s not the use of plastics that’s the issue — it’s the end-of-life management.”
The organization has pushed the Trudeau government to refrain from listing plastics as "toxic" under CEPA, a key part of the federal plan to reduce plastic waste announced last October. Instead, the CIAC wants the federal government to co-ordinate a national plastic waste management regime. Other industry groups and companies have also been advocating for a similar approach.
Waste management currently falls under provincial jurisdiction and recycling programs are managed by municipalities, creating a patchwork of rules around what can — and can't — be recycled in the country.
That's confusing for Canadians putting their trash in the sorting bin and makes it tricky for industry to develop easy-to-recycle products, including packaging. Some municipal sorting facilities can accept most plastic types; others can't. The lack of a co-ordinated waste stream reduces the amount of well-sorted, high-quality raw plastic available to recycling companies. As a result, lower-quality and badly sorted plastics usually end up in landfills or might be sent overseas via the U.S.
“Instead of having (thousands) of different recycling programs, get one,” says Mantagaris. She points to the concept of extended producer responsibility (EPR) as the solution. EPR programs force plastic producers to fund and operate recycling systems for their products.
Theoretically, transferring fiscal responsibility for recycling to producers incentivizes them to become more efficient, create products that are easier to recycle and invest in innovative recycling technology.
“One system, and industry will pay for it, industry will manage it,” Mantagaris says.
Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick are planning to implement EPR programs. However, environmentalists point out that B.C., which has the country’s most advanced EPR, still has a poor recycling record. In 2019, only about 46 per cent of plastic packaging was recovered, the program’s most recent annual report stated.
The December report by Greenpeace pointed out half of B.C.’s waste ends up in landfills, incinerators or the environment. And researchers at Memorial University found the B.C. program has had almost no impact on the volume of waste found on the province’s shoreline.
For World Cleanup Day, Greenpeace, community allies and volunteers co-ordinate a cleanup activity and plastic polluter brand audit. Photos by Amy Scaife / Greenpeace
That is particularly concerning because ocean plastic pollution is among the factors driving the government's decision to regulate plastic. In 2018, the Trudeau government committed to the international Oceans Plastic Charter, an informal agreement to drastically reduce plastic pollution while increasing the amount of recycled plastic on the market. And while the proposed plan aims to meet these international targets, actually achieving them without cutting back on how much plastic Canadians use will be a struggle, environmentalists say.
To meet the charter’s goals, mechanical recycling facilities, which currently handle about seven per cent of the country’s plastic waste, would need to roughly triple capacity by 2030. Canada’s chemical recycling rate would need to skyrocket from one per cent to 36 per cent. And even then, recycling could only take care of 62 per cent of the country’s plastic waste. The remainder would end up in incinerators, landfills or the environment, the 2019 ECCC-commissioned report projects.
Reduction over recycling
Focusing on building better recycling systems misses the point, says MacBride, the professor at CUNY.
“The direction we should be heading is drastically reducing the amount of plastic coursing through our economies,” she says.
That doesn’t mean getting rid of plastic entirely — it is necessary for some products like medical devices, she says. Rather, MacBride would like to see a systemic change to our throwaway culture.
That's particularly important because ridding the world of the plastic we've already created is almost impossible, Liboiron points out.
"Plastic can’t be contained," they say. “It’s one of the most durable things in the world. It’ll last epochs” — which means reducing how much we produce is key to keeping it out of the environment.
When consulted as an expert during the federal policy’s initial drafting phase, they recommended ending subsidies for the oil and petrochemical industry to slow plastic production. According to the December Greenpeace report, those subsidies have topped $334 million to virgin oil plastic producers alone since 2017. Canada's oil and gas industries, for their part, receive about $4.8 billion annually in public subsidies noted a December 2020 analysis by the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
Still, cutting back production is only half the solution, they say. Canadian policy-makers need to take a holistic look at how Canadians eat, move and otherwise inhabit the world — then develop locally tailored systems that make it possible to live well without disposable plastic.
"There are people alive (who) have memories of before there was disposable packaging,” they note. “They ate things. They were OK.”
The blog song for today is: " Uncle Sam" by Madness
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