When Vancouver — and then Canada — announced plans to ban plastic straws, purveyors of takeout drinks feared business would suffer. After all, how do you sip bubble tea, a milkshake or a fruit smoothie without a straw?
This isn’t about banning plastic, which will remain a useful part of our lives, writes federal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson. It’s about responsibly managing plastic so it stops polluting our environment.
Plastic may now be considered toxic under Canada’s environmental law, but the hard work of reducing single-use plastics and improving recycling still lies ahead.
Plastic is now considered toxic under Canada’s primary environmental law — the Canadian Environmental Protection Act — the Trudeau government announced Wednesday.
Investors are forcing the world’s biggest plastic manufacturers to reveal how many harmful plastic pellets they are leaking into rivers, lakes and oceans worldwide.
The federal government is calling for a new “circular economy” that would rely on massively scaling up existing recycling facilities and still-nascent recycling technologies to keep disposable plastic ubiquitous in our daily lives. But can recycling really save us?
Canada's $28-billion plastics industry has always resisted efforts to curtail production. But with the federal government proposing a ban on certain single-use items and looking to classify plastic as toxic, the pushback has grown even greater.