A ban on single-use plastics goes into effect in Canada today. Here's what that means
On Dec. 20, 2022, commonly used and harmful plastics will no longer be manufactured in or imported into the country
The first phase of Canada’s single-use plastic ban goes into effect on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022. That means some commonly used plastics will no longer be allowed to be manufactured and imported for sale in Canada.
Starting today, the following categories of single use plastics will be prohibited from being made or imported into Canada:
checkout bags;
plastic cutlery;
takeout containers, also known as foodservice ware, made from or containing plastics that are hard to recycle;
stir sticks;
straws (with some exceptions to be made for people who need them for medical or accessibility reasons).
By June 2023, the manufacturing and importing of plastic ring carriers, like those found on six-packs of beer and soda cans, will be forbidden and the sale of these items will be prohibited by June of 2024.
As of June 2024, the sale of flexible straws in packaged beverage containers, like juice boxes, will be prohibited.
The categories were determined based on how many of these items were found during environmental cleanups, how threatening they are to wildlife, how difficult they are to recycle and whether they can be easily replaced by alternatives. Hard-to-recycle plastics are things like black plastic containers commonly used in take-out dining, styrofoam containers and plastic cutlery.
Flexible straws will remain available for people who use them for medical or accessibility reasons. This includes for use at home, in social settings, or health-care settings like hospitals and long-term care facilities.
Changing habits over time
Jacquie Hutchings is the co-founder and COO of Guelph-based Friendlier, which helps businesses transition from single-use plastic packaging to reusable packaging. She says the best way to cut down on dependency on single-use plastics is to create a reuse system.
If you think about 100 years ago, there was no disposable packaging, everything was reusable, so we are taking it back to the basics.
“We’re trying to shift the way that people think from a take, make and dispose (system) to a make for reuse and actually reuse products so that their resources can be preserved for many lives,” she tells Yahoo News Canada.
When people transition from plastic bags to reusable ones, they may end up with an abundance of the latter, which can be interpreted as wasteful. However, Hutchings says that’s to be expected when making such a big change in our habits.
“It’s understood that through that transition, that change of behaviour, there’s going to be some turbulent periods where maybe we are making a bit higher quality bags but people are still learning how to use those and there may be a bit of waste there,” Hutchings says.
And while it might be easier to swap a different type of packaging for single-use plastics, like paper, or a pulp-based material, that won’t solve the root problem of how much waste is being created. Ultimately it’s about shifting our conditioning from seeing everything as disposable to recognizing that things have value and can be reused, to then actually reusing them.
“There might be a little waste in that transition but ultimately we’re forcing that behaviour change so that we can get away from that wasteful, single-use package we’ve become so dependent on,” says Hutchings. “If you think about 100 years ago, there was no disposable packaging, everything was reusable, so we are taking it back to the basics.”
