This Waste Reduction Week is an excellent opportunity to talk about how waste and our ecosystems intersect. 37 million people live in the Great Lakes basin between Canada and the United States. The region is home to some of North America’s largest cities, boasts one of the world’s highest GDPs, and is the world’s 2nd largest freshwater ecosystem. The Great Lakes are the source of drinking water for cities like Toronto, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Chicago, and yet this ecosystem is littered with more than 22 000 000 pounds of plastic, annually. Efforts to curb the issue of waste entering this critical ecosystem with municipal recycling programs and shoreline clean ups have had little success with keeping our Great Lakes safe from waste pollution, putting our wildlife and drinking water at risk. Repeatedly, environmental organizations have identified key waste culprits entering our waterways: cigarette butts, plastic bottles, coffee cups, straws, plastic bags, stirs sticks and other microplastics.
Solutions from Government & Corporations
Enter Canada’s federal government in 2020 with the announcement of the Canada-wide strategy on zero waste plastic which included a ban of a single-use plastics and comprehensive strategy to move towards a circular economy. Six items made the ban in its first announcement on October 7th: plastic checkout bags, straws, stir sticks, six-pack rings, cutlery, and food ware made from hard-to-recycle plastics (polystyrene). The ban, beginning in 2021, is a step in the right direction from our federal leaders, but Canadians have more work to do to fill the gap in waste items still pervasive in our lives. The single-use plastics ban puts stock in conversations about innovative solutions to single-use plastics and calls for action from consumers and industry alike. Items not on the ban such as coffee cups, plastic bottles, and cigarettes require businesses to create solutions to recapture or replace these environmental culprits and champion impactful sustainability strategies. Hope can be seen with announcements from nationwide industries dovetailing sustainability initiatives with the federal ban. Tim Hortons announced a trial deposit program for coffee cups and food containers in cities like Toronto and Montreal as a way to keep their waste out of the environment while not pressuring municipal recycling centers.
What Premier Can Do
Premier Environmental Services has partnered with vendors to create a Zero Waste PPE recapture program in factories and commercial spaces that supports a circular economy and keeps single-use masks out of landfills and away from nature. Canadians everywhere need to step up for the environment when it comes to waste reduction in 2020.
With sustainable solutions becoming more accessible to consumers, we are left with little excuse to deter integrating sustainable practices into our lives. Our toothbrushes can be bamboo, our shampoo can be an unpackaged bar, and locally grown produce can be collected in a reusable bag. Even our pets can help with plant-based, compostable doggy bags (not ‘biodegradable’, which by the way will likely end up in landfill). With these options being comparable, or in many cases cheaper, in cost – our excuses to put off cutting waste and begin living sustainably are running out. COVID-19 may have hit pause on some of our favourite ways to reduce waste like our reusable mugs at local café or bringing your own container to pick up lunch, but it has also opened the door to rethinking how we interact with sustainability at home and our daily routines. If you’re a business who wants to reduce your waste, but don’t know where to start – we want to talk to you. If you’re company that wants your employees to learn the importance of sustainability – we want to talk to you. Waste reduction week 2020 is the opportunity we need to examine our actions and how they impact our local ecosystems and the planet at large.
