11 ms·

Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

362 points by robin_reala 5y ago

maxqin1 5y ago
The focus here is on the environment. However, plastic is linked to many health issues as well.
- hirundo 5y ago
  Plastic packaging makes hygienic food more accessible as an effective and cheap barrier to pathogens, incoming and outgoing. Such public health interests should be balanced against their toxicity. It's easier for wealthier people to substitute with restaurants, servants and higher quality materials. So a general plastic ban would amount to a regressive tax on sanitary food.
  - gogopuppygogo 5y ago
    That penn and teller episode with the petition for removing dihydrogen monoxide from schools was fantastic. https://youtu.be/zVxypRWZODQ https://youtu.be/zVxypRWZODQ
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      Using obscure terminology to confuse people certainly makes a good joke :-) I'm not sure it really tells us much though.
      - waterhouse 5y ago
        It tells us that people are willing to sign a petition to ban a thing while clearly not having done their research on the thing, just because an authoritative-seeming stranger told them something plausible. It means that such petitions shouldn't be taken seriously; and, to the extent that they are serious, it implies something about people's recklessness with regard to policymaking. (I wonder how such a survey would fare today, when most people have smartphones with browsers and an internet connection.)
  - ncallaway 5y ago
    Agree that a case by case analysis is appropriate, but I don’t really see any world where the cost/benefit analysis of plastic and water would be anywhere near the same ballpark
  - caenorst 5y ago
    Why is this comment downvoted? It seems to be nuanced, or are there some studies showing that this is absurd? I'm genuinly curious
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      Because of the "dihydrogen monoxide" snark.
      - caenorst 5y ago
        Oh that was trolling, didn't pay attention about this part...
- refurb 5y ago
  Such as? BPA-free plastics are common. I mean, we implant plastic medical devices in humans.
version_five 5y ago
The canadian government is big into the business of making these kind of "declarations" these days, so our PM can demonstrate to everyone how progressive he is. Although I don't think Mother Jones is a legitimate news source, so would be careful about taking anything in the article at face value.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Why do you find Mother Jones to be an illegitimate news source?
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > so our PM can demonstrate to everyone how progressive he is. Maybe he should focus on providing vaccines instead (Canada's vaccination rate sits at barely 4% while the US is at 38%) [0] and stop pushing pipelines to export some of the most environmentally destructive oil on the planet [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina... [1] https://news.yahoo.com/trudeau-stresses-disappointment-keystone-xl-030726282.html https://news.yahoo.com/trudeau-stresses-disappointment-keyst...
  - version_five 5y ago
    Not an expert in the oil sands but personally I think there are benefits from getting oil from a virtually uninhabited area in northern canada vs relying on other suppliers. I completely agree on the vaccine issue, Canada had failed miserably vs. comparator nations in this regard.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      What comparator nations? Do you mean the ones with their own vaccine manufacturing, and the ones that put in place protectionist measures to prevent their trading partners and allies from buying vaccines from them? Canada is just lucky the EU doesn't behave like the US, and we have been able to source vaccines from Pfizer's EU manufacturing. When the chips were down, we couldn't rely on our friends to the south. Now that we have supply, Canada's vaccination rate is climbing rapidly. Well over 50% of the eligible (12+) population and climbing.
_qwfv 5y ago
Great. Regulation and reduction of plastic production is long overdue. There are some places where it makes sense to use plastic, but we're far, far overproducing the stuff because it's convenient. It's fantastically difficult to recycle in practice, burning it produces toxic smoke and carbon emissions, and putting it into the waste stream results in a bunch of it getting dropped on the sides of roadways.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- belinder 5y ago
  Hopefully reduction of plastic production does not lead to reduction in plastic recycling.
  - Pfhreak 5y ago
    Not sure why it would?
    - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
      If there is less demand for plastic in general, then that means there could be less demand for recycling (properly sorted) old plastic to produce new plastic goods.
      - Pfhreak 5y ago
        We recycle less than 10% of our plastic. And of that, very little goes back to producing the same products -- plastic is typically degraded when recycled and converted from food packaging down into benches or clothing, both of which will shed microplastics into the environment before being sent to the landfill. Plastic recycling is not an eternal loop like metal recycling can be. It's almost entirely downcycling when it happens at all.
  - lstamour 5y ago
    As TFA says: > Plastic recycling was invented by the plastics industry in the 1970s to assuage environmental concerns without substantially reducing plastic consumption, according to Max Liboiron, an expert on plastic waste and a professor at Memorial University. > It has never worked. Despite decades of effort, only about nine percent of Canada’s plastic waste is currently recycled, according to the 2019 ECCC-commissioned study.
bluenose69 5y ago
Related: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1897203267988 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1897203267988 holds an interview on the topic by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
karaterobot 5y ago
If there are restrictions, I hope they target major microplastic sources like tires and textiles, rather than easily scapegoated but very minor sources, like plastic bags and drinking straws. Based on precedent, I am not holding my breath, but I hope so.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  I'm personally hoping they revisit all the endocrine-disrupting crap added to fire-retarding fabrics and food container lining.
  - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    The entire class of fluorine-based waterproofers should be banned, since they don't degrade. Next ban polyester, since the fibers are a major source of microplastics, and since they are flammable (made of plastic after all) they are coated in toxic and endocrine-disrupting flame retardants.
- pedalpete 5y ago
  Have you got a source for this concern? Tires are rubber, not plastic as far as I know, and though many textiles are polyester, and fleece is mostly recycled plastics (if I recall) where is the mass use of plastic in the textile industry?
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Rubber is a plastic. As for polyester, what do you think PET plastic is? I will add that a weathered component of tire rubber has recently been identified as causing mass death of salmon when it washes off into streams.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      The fish-killing is caused by an added chemical that acts as a sunscreen. It increases the UV resistance of the rubber, thus prolonging tire life. It isn't the rubber itself that is the problem, at least in that example.
dataflow 5y ago
It's such a pleasant surprise to me how effectively and quickly people have become concerned about this issue. The recent WWF report came out less than 2 years ago [1]. Microplastics were obviously known for a long time, but that's when conversations about microplastics re-ignited. And now we can see an entire country declaring plastics toxic and restricting them. If you'd asked me an hour ago, I'd have predicted it'd take at least another decade before concern about this would spread widely enough to prompt a national policy shift. Great to see that raising public awareness can actually do something! [1] https://wwf.panda.org/?348371/Could-you-be-eating-a-credit-card-a-week https://wwf.panda.org/?348371/Could-you-be-eating-a-credit-c...
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  > how effectively and quickly people have become concerned about this issue. I don't really know how to take this. Surely you're joking? People have been banging on about plastics for at least the past 20 years while I've been paying attention, so probably longer. So some report came out two years ago, that was long overdue.
  - vmception 5y ago
    A long overdue report came out that prompted a long overdue state level response, in less than 2 years A perspective.
- kibwen 5y ago
  Environmental action can be taken relatively quickly when nation-state-level corporate interests aren't funding campaigns to oppose it. The premier example is the banning of CFCs in the 1980s in defense of the ozone layer: "The discovery of the hole [over Antarctica] was evidence that the magnitude of the problem was far greater than scientists had originally predicted. International alarm at the ozone layer’s thinning led to unprecedented multilateral action to ban the dangerous chemicals that were responsible for its deterioration – chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). By 1987, just two years after the hole was discovered, an international treaty was in place that cut the use of CFCs in half. Three years later in 1990, the Montreal Protocol was strengthened to ban the use of CFCs altogether in industrialised countries by the year 2000 and by the year 2010 in developing countries. Today, the use of CFCs is outlawed by 197 countries around the world and scientists concur that the ozone layer is slowly recovering as a result." https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-how-the-world-rapidly-sealed-a-deal-to-save-the-ozone-layer/ https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-...
aussieguy1234 5y ago
Many people might think something as massive as the ocean is basically unlimited and that there's no way us humans could screw it up. Not true. Take a sample of seawater from almost anywhere right now and you'll find microplastics. Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.
- standardUser 5y ago
  I can't understand this perspective at all, but it seems to have been a key philosophy guiding human development for a very long time. Was it just a belief based on convenience?
  - _qwfv 5y ago
    It's a story as old as humanity. There's many examples of humans exhausting their nearby resources because they thought they were effectively infinite. Whether that's a forest, a food stock, a water source, or something else.
    - notriddle 5y ago
      And every time it's happened in the past, the solution has been to leave. There's always been somewhere else to go.
      - _qwfv 5y ago
        Not every time, or at least the solution doesn't always result in everyone surviving. The Mayan civilization, for instance, is thought to have exhausted their local resources and fallen apart as a result.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Easter Island is another example.
  - rolleiflex 5y ago
cced 5y ago
Any insight on how this might impact the 3D printer space?
- buildbot 5y ago
  It probably won’t much, as the most common plastic is actually corn based (PLA) and IIRC, can be composted. Only commercially though https://www.3dnatives.com/en/pla-filament-230720194/ https://www.3dnatives.com/en/pla-filament-230720194/
- delecti 5y ago
  From TFA: > Under the proposed rules, Canada will ban six single-use plastic items, like straws and six-pack rings, create incentives for companies to use recycled plastic, and force plastic producers to pay for recycling I suspect it won't restrict 3d printing, but could conceivably increase prices for some materials.
caiob 5y ago
Great! More taxes out of thin air. We don’t have enough of those.
gtirloni 5y ago
I don't understand why a bunch of comments here are showing as downvoted. Is this a controversial topic by any means? Honest question.
- slumpt_ 5y ago
  HN can be a bit of a hive for libertarian-minded engineers. Regulation = bad, to hell with the nuance, etc.
  - caenorst 5y ago
    I think it's more about anonymous down voting to be very enticing for people who "hate" certain ideologies. Which can go either side, regulation, unionization, I've seen both side comments been downvoted. But on both case, yup, to hell with the nuance.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    There's not much nuance when a governmental agency puts "Plastic manufactured items" on the same list as "Asbestos", "Lead", and "Mercury".
    - slumpt_ 5y ago
      ok
swiley 5y ago
What the hell does it mean "plastics are toxic?" PS/ABS? Maybe Cellophane? That's just heavily processed wood.
hparadiz 5y ago
My car was recently hit while it was parked and the plastic trim under the front bumper started to come off by of course scraping against the road. It's not simple to remove either. I had to jack the car and remove some bolts from under it holding this plastic. I can only imagine how much micro plastics it spread all over the road and then of course washed into the ocean.
bioinformatics 5y ago
Looking forward to reduce plastic in the clinical and research settings. I think it's a great idea to elminate at least 99% of plastic in these environments. It will make patient treatment much more human, research much more transactional and pure, while eliminating pollution in most places.
nemo44x 5y ago
I thinking banning plastic straws will end up pushing the movement towards reduced plastic usage backwards. At least until there is a competent alternative. Paper straws are not it. Especially since straws aren’t even a real contributor or issue overall. But it’s not at all difficult for a populist or reactionary to hit a nerve with this kind of thing however well intentioned it is.
ciconia 5y ago
That's a great development, but I'm afraid in a way it's already a lost cause. That stuff is everywhere.
swader999 5y ago
Finally something good out of Ottawa. To be fair not much plastic ends up outside a landfill in Canada. But this is still the right way to go.
callamdelaney 5y ago
In the UK a granny can't buy a few vegetables without being charged a surcharge for the bag that's required; though corporations package food with thousands and thousands of tonnes of excess packaging with seemingly no additional charge. Where's the justice in this? Why charge the consumer when huge corporations like Asda, Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Sainsburys etc are happy to buy tonnes of plastic that's unnecessary and will be thrown away? Carrier bag charges are just posturing in the face of this.
motohagiography 5y ago
Even as someone who doesn't think highly of this admin or mo'jones, plastics are the crack cocaine of manufacturing, and of all the empty gestures this government has made, this is probably the most useful thing they could do. It's regressive in the sense that it will cause a hedonic hit to people who buy cheap things for comfort, but the majority of plastics begin and end their lives as disposable garbage. Let's just say when you clean up a park, creek, lake, or a beach, you don't end up with a collection of champagne bottles and caviar tins - it's all fast food bottles and containers. The next one would be concrete and laws about disposing of contaminated fill, because that's the huge environmental horror afflicting rural areas that is a direct result of a real estate bubble manufactured by their other policies, but it's a start.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  The problem with these kinds of things from this particular gov't is that they are spoken about and press releases are issued.... but they never actually happen. Electoral reform, indigenous reconciliation (or even just clean water for reserves), CO2 reductions, you name it... Ok, we did get cannabis legalization.
  - ornornor 5y ago
    > cannabis legalization. Because there was so. much. money. in it. Both from tax revenue and from reduction in policing costs.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      Honestly, it's what got them elected. I met lots of people who were going to vote NDP (many of my friends, coworkers) -- or not vote at all (trades people who were working on my house, people I talked to online etc.) -- who got out and voted Liberal because of this issue alone. It's been a few years now and the world hasn't ended and it doesn't feel like cannabis consumption is any higher really. It was probably good policy to do it. While the NDP (who were ahead of the Liberals in the polls at the beginning of that election and actually in majority territory) have always had legalization as policy, I bet you that Mulcair wouldn't have had the political confidence or buy-in from the provinces to get it through like Trudeau did.
danielrhodes 5y ago
I'm curious what is meant by "plastic" here - it would be a shame if they banned all plastics. Plastic as we know it comes in many varieties, depending on the use case. In general I think it refers to polyethylene. [1] However, it is also possible to produce plastics from hemp, which is vastly superior on many dimensions compared to what is common today. Hemp was just legalized in many US states in 2018 after having been banned in the 30s due to lobbying pressure from cotton manufacturers. Moreover, there are recyclable (and I assume less toxic) plastics produced from corn, which you might see in cups at forward-thinking shops. These plastics biodegrade significantly faster than petroleum-based alternatives. So hopefully any legislation is specific to plastics which are harmful. [1] The report here goes into more detail on which specific long-chain polymers are commonly found in pollutants: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/evaluating-existing-substances/science-assessment-plastic-pollution.html#toc5 https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
mediaman 5y ago
There is a lot of misleading and false statements in this article. They claim plastic recycling doesn't work. It's true that most plastic isn't recycled, but that's because of lackluster government involvement, not some technological barrier. British Columbia has the most sophisticated recycling equipment in North America. Two plants there first use lasers to identify different types of plastic (PP, HDPE, PET, etc) in the incoming stream and then use air blasts to categorize it. These streams are then separated by color. The material then goes to a plastics reclamation facility where the material is shredded, washed, dried, melted and forced through a filter, and turned to pellet. The result is that 74% of plastic beverage containers in BC are recycled. Why isn't this done elsewhere? It's because BC has a tax on plastic packaging, and this tax money is then used to subsidize the loss from converting recyclables into new plastic pellet (the cost is higher than the revenue). And other governments don't want to do it, partly due to lobbying from plastics packaging manufacturers. Plastic recycling does work when society wants it to. But instead we turn to paper. Paper produces double the CO2 emissions of plastic, and it requires vastly more energy: a European study showed that switching to paper in Europe would consume 57% more energy and 61% more greenhouse gases from packaging than are produced today. In a world where human existence is threatened most likely from runaway climate change, this seems like a bad idea. And while we're so focused on transitioning plastic packaging to paper, we ignore the real problem with plastic in the oceans: plastic netting dumped from illegal fishing. Plastic netting wraps around animals and drowns or suffocates them. It can also drag along a seabed, killing the seabed life. But this is considered a difficult problem to solve (international waters, policing is difficult, etc) so we ignore it. The idea policy would be: 1. Tax plastic packaging. Use the tax money to pay for recycling that works, which has been proven to work. 2. Develop international treaties and enforcement mechanisms to prevent illegal fishing and find ways to reduce fish consumption. 3. Implement carbon taxes that reflect the cost to human survival imposed by any kind of packaging, or other activity, in accordance with the degree of GHG emission.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  74% is still a far cry from a solved problem - what do they do with the quarter that can't be recycled? Aluminium is actually 100% recyclable with some countries approaching 98%. Plastic has symbols that tell you what kind of plastic a given piece of packaging is made of, and the consumers need to figure out which kind are recyclable in their particular state or local area. Then some plastics are thermosetting and therefore unrecyclable - they have to be broken down through pyrolysis or similar. So while it's true that plastic recycling is possible, you have to: 1) sort out the random mish-mash that is the recycling system which vary by local area and are incomprehensible to consumers for the purposes of sorting. 2) Increase that 74% number to something in high-90's. Probably forbid unrecyclable plastics for single-use consumer goods and packaging, and somehow constrain the wild variety of plastics that enter the waste stream to a few known varieties that can be sorted 3) forbid items that shed microplastics like there is no tomorrow. This would include clothing made out of nylon? This seems very unpopular.
sangnoir 5y ago
I believe plastic may be human civilizations "Great Filter" - I'm only half-joking. In less than a century, we managed to put plastic everywhere on the planet, and microplastics everywhere inside our food sources and our bodies, including in placenta(!). Our reach exceeds our grasp, we do not yet know what dangers microplastics pose, and we do not have the technology to remediate it. Our reach exceeds our grasp. I do hope plastics end up more or less benign, but there is a very real possibility that humanities gravestone will read "Here lies human beings. They managed to make their way into low orbit and their only moon, but were felled by their discovery of synthetic polymers"
- redisman 5y ago
  It’s also possible once it saturates the ocean enough, it’ll get ingested by plankton which won’t survive much of it and then it’s game over for most life
userbinator 5y ago
"toxic"? My BS detector is off the scale on that one. Plastics are used precisely because they are inert and nonreactive. If you burn them you can definitely create toxins, but then why not declare wood toxic too.
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor Chemically pure hydrocarbon polymers may be inert and generally nonreactive, however pure polymers like nylon or polyester are virtually useless. Plastics only become useful when they're mixed with a vast array of plasticizers, conditioners, chain extenders and other industrial chemicals. And those chemicals absolutely leach out of the materials we laypeople refer to as 'plastics', even before you consider environmental factors that cause the materials to decay.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I'm not an expert or a chemist, but I have the impression that the leaching of chemicals from plastics should generally be in proportion to how soft and flexible they are. The first thing that comes to mind as full of "squishy" plastics is a typical automobile today, hence the "new car smell". People are also conditioned to think that more soft plastics means higher quality. But clothes and other things that don't smell and aren't squeezable would seem on the face of it to be unlikely hazards. We've got built in chemoreceptors, so why be paranoid as though we didn't? Are you aware of or concerned about PVC piping widely used for plumbing? Do you know of any practical plans for eliminating it?
    - userbinator 5y ago
      The most widely used plastic, polyethylene, does not require plasticisers at all; indeed it is in (soft) PVC that plasticisers are used the most: https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/multimedia_pub_fsf_60_01.html https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/mul...
- 5y ago
WalterBright 5y ago
Tax the plastic, and let the market sort out the restrictions. Not only does it result in the most efficient way to "regulate", it results in tax revenue for the government, so they don't need to tax things like jobs.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  I would go beyond that. On top of taxing plastic, we should also create a 'new' plastic quota. Petro-chemical industry makes profit only on new plastic not recycled plastic. They will forever fight this transition away from plastic. If you introduze a plastic 'from oil' quota, the Nestlé's and Unilever's of the world would have to bid for a share of new plastic in a "new plastic market", making plastic from oil more expensive. This would incentivize manufacturers to either create plastic return deposit schemes, or to recycle more plastic, or just straight move to glass/aluminium/paper. Edit: the point of this is that it would desincentivize manufacturers away from plastic while increasing the "per tonne" profit of petro-chemicals (who would be manufacturing a lot less).
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  This has always been the solution, but politically untenable due to actually causing people to sacrifice. Want less carbon emissions? Tax the source of carbon emissions, I.e. fossil fuels. How much? Keep raising the tax until the consumption levels go down sufficiently. Same with plastic (although above solution would also prob solve plastics since they come from fossil fuels too). Bottom line, has and always been, we can’t afford to have this many people living this luxurious of a life (quarter acre lots, single family detached house with 2+ cars, constant AC, $50/hour commercial flights, $0.50 per mile travel costs by car, dialysis for 80+ year olds, etc). Assuming the goal is to leave the environment in the same condition for future generations. Recycling and reusing is far too little, reduce has been the only solution for a long time.
mlindner 5y ago
And on marches the steps of technology backwards. I guess the next thing is we'll be using tin cans again and diecast metal for most components?
- redisman 5y ago
  Considering long term impacts is hardly ludditism
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Everything could be sold again in glass containers with scratches for labels.
Isamu 5y ago
>declares plastics toxic I didn’t see where in the article that plastics in the environment were shown to be toxic. Can someone help point to the study this is based on?
dukeofdoom 5y ago
Things taste better from a glass bottle. Which is how most drinks would be sold. The only downside was broken glass everywhere. Not uncommon for kids getting serious cuts just playing in the neighbourhood couple times a year. Sometimes main arteries, and death was a possibility.
ashneo76 5y ago
YES! No to neutralize the opposition from the petrochemical industries, plastic, companies like coke which literally say " as long as there is recycling, pepper disposal of plastic is on the customers". Companies like that are rich by offloading the production cost in the environment which people have to pay
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
this is good as a way around the setback that occurred in the last year. Far as I can see on the ground, the whole environmental movement, climate change, plastics, oceans etc, was steadily ramping up more and more... Greta etc.... everyone using reusable grocery bags was a highly visible thing and then the pandemic/covid hit and all of a sudden we're all using plastic bags by the ton again and people are littering masks all over the city etc. No more reusable shopping bags, a ton more waste because everyone is at home, etc etc. Big set back.

362 points by robin_reala 5y ago

maxqin1 5y ago

The focus here is on the environment. However, plastic is linked to many health issues as well.

hirundo 5y ago
Plastic packaging makes hygienic food more accessible as an effective and cheap barrier to pathogens, incoming and outgoing. Such public health interests should be balanced against their toxicity. It's easier for wealthier people to substitute with restaurants, servants and higher quality materials. So a general plastic ban would amount to a regressive tax on sanitary food.
- gogopuppygogo 5y ago
  That penn and teller episode with the petition for removing dihydrogen monoxide from schools was fantastic. https://youtu.be/zVxypRWZODQ https://youtu.be/zVxypRWZODQ
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Using obscure terminology to confuse people certainly makes a good joke :-) I'm not sure it really tells us much though.
    - waterhouse 5y ago
      It tells us that people are willing to sign a petition to ban a thing while clearly not having done their research on the thing, just because an authoritative-seeming stranger told them something plausible. It means that such petitions shouldn't be taken seriously; and, to the extent that they are serious, it implies something about people's recklessness with regard to policymaking. (I wonder how such a survey would fare today, when most people have smartphones with browsers and an internet connection.)
- ncallaway 5y ago
  Agree that a case by case analysis is appropriate, but I don’t really see any world where the cost/benefit analysis of plastic and water would be anywhere near the same ballpark
- caenorst 5y ago
  Why is this comment downvoted? It seems to be nuanced, or are there some studies showing that this is absurd? I'm genuinly curious
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Because of the "dihydrogen monoxide" snark.
    - caenorst 5y ago
      Oh that was trolling, didn't pay attention about this part...
refurb 5y ago
Such as? BPA-free plastics are common. I mean, we implant plastic medical devices in humans.

version_five 5y ago

The canadian government is big into the business of making these kind of "declarations" these days, so our PM can demonstrate to everyone how progressive he is. Although I don't think Mother Jones is a legitimate news source, so would be careful about taking anything in the article at face value.

jimbob45 5y ago
Why do you find Mother Jones to be an illegitimate news source?
908B64B197 5y ago
> so our PM can demonstrate to everyone how progressive he is. Maybe he should focus on providing vaccines instead (Canada's vaccination rate sits at barely 4% while the US is at 38%) [0] and stop pushing pipelines to export some of the most environmentally destructive oil on the planet [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina... [1] https://news.yahoo.com/trudeau-stresses-disappointment-keystone-xl-030726282.html https://news.yahoo.com/trudeau-stresses-disappointment-keyst...
- version_five 5y ago
  Not an expert in the oil sands but personally I think there are benefits from getting oil from a virtually uninhabited area in northern canada vs relying on other suppliers. I completely agree on the vaccine issue, Canada had failed miserably vs. comparator nations in this regard.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    What comparator nations? Do you mean the ones with their own vaccine manufacturing, and the ones that put in place protectionist measures to prevent their trading partners and allies from buying vaccines from them? Canada is just lucky the EU doesn't behave like the US, and we have been able to source vaccines from Pfizer's EU manufacturing. When the chips were down, we couldn't rely on our friends to the south. Now that we have supply, Canada's vaccination rate is climbing rapidly. Well over 50% of the eligible (12+) population and climbing.

_qwfv 5y ago

Great. Regulation and reduction of plastic production is long overdue. There are some places where it makes sense to use plastic, but we're far, far overproducing the stuff because it's convenient. It's fantastically difficult to recycle in practice, burning it produces toxic smoke and carbon emissions, and putting it into the waste stream results in a bunch of it getting dropped on the sides of roadways.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
belinder 5y ago
Hopefully reduction of plastic production does not lead to reduction in plastic recycling.
- Pfhreak 5y ago
  Not sure why it would?
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    If there is less demand for plastic in general, then that means there could be less demand for recycling (properly sorted) old plastic to produce new plastic goods.
    - Pfhreak 5y ago
      We recycle less than 10% of our plastic. And of that, very little goes back to producing the same products -- plastic is typically degraded when recycled and converted from food packaging down into benches or clothing, both of which will shed microplastics into the environment before being sent to the landfill. Plastic recycling is not an eternal loop like metal recycling can be. It's almost entirely downcycling when it happens at all.
- lstamour 5y ago
  As TFA says: > Plastic recycling was invented by the plastics industry in the 1970s to assuage environmental concerns without substantially reducing plastic consumption, according to Max Liboiron, an expert on plastic waste and a professor at Memorial University. > It has never worked. Despite decades of effort, only about nine percent of Canada’s plastic waste is currently recycled, according to the 2019 ECCC-commissioned study.

bluenose69 5y ago

Related: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1897203267988 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1897203267988 holds an interview on the topic by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

karaterobot 5y ago

If there are restrictions, I hope they target major microplastic sources like tires and textiles, rather than easily scapegoated but very minor sources, like plastic bags and drinking straws. Based on precedent, I am not holding my breath, but I hope so.

bpodgursky 5y ago
I'm personally hoping they revisit all the endocrine-disrupting crap added to fire-retarding fabrics and food container lining.
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  The entire class of fluorine-based waterproofers should be banned, since they don't degrade. Next ban polyester, since the fibers are a major source of microplastics, and since they are flammable (made of plastic after all) they are coated in toxic and endocrine-disrupting flame retardants.
pedalpete 5y ago
Have you got a source for this concern? Tires are rubber, not plastic as far as I know, and though many textiles are polyester, and fleece is mostly recycled plastics (if I recall) where is the mass use of plastic in the textile industry?
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Rubber is a plastic. As for polyester, what do you think PET plastic is? I will add that a weathered component of tire rubber has recently been identified as causing mass death of salmon when it washes off into streams.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    The fish-killing is caused by an added chemical that acts as a sunscreen. It increases the UV resistance of the rubber, thus prolonging tire life. It isn't the rubber itself that is the problem, at least in that example.

dataflow 5y ago

It's such a pleasant surprise to me how effectively and quickly people have become concerned about this issue. The recent WWF report came out less than 2 years ago [1]. Microplastics were obviously known for a long time, but that's when conversations about microplastics re-ignited. And now we can see an entire country declaring plastics toxic and restricting them. If you'd asked me an hour ago, I'd have predicted it'd take at least another decade before concern about this would spread widely enough to prompt a national policy shift. Great to see that raising public awareness can actually do something! [1] https://wwf.panda.org/?348371/Could-you-be-eating-a-credit-card-a-week https://wwf.panda.org/?348371/Could-you-be-eating-a-credit-c...

TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
> how effectively and quickly people have become concerned about this issue. I don't really know how to take this. Surely you're joking? People have been banging on about plastics for at least the past 20 years while I've been paying attention, so probably longer. So some report came out two years ago, that was long overdue.
- vmception 5y ago
  A long overdue report came out that prompted a long overdue state level response, in less than 2 years A perspective.
kibwen 5y ago
Environmental action can be taken relatively quickly when nation-state-level corporate interests aren't funding campaigns to oppose it. The premier example is the banning of CFCs in the 1980s in defense of the ozone layer: "The discovery of the hole [over Antarctica] was evidence that the magnitude of the problem was far greater than scientists had originally predicted. International alarm at the ozone layer’s thinning led to unprecedented multilateral action to ban the dangerous chemicals that were responsible for its deterioration – chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). By 1987, just two years after the hole was discovered, an international treaty was in place that cut the use of CFCs in half. Three years later in 1990, the Montreal Protocol was strengthened to ban the use of CFCs altogether in industrialised countries by the year 2000 and by the year 2010 in developing countries. Today, the use of CFCs is outlawed by 197 countries around the world and scientists concur that the ozone layer is slowly recovering as a result." https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-how-the-world-rapidly-sealed-a-deal-to-save-the-ozone-layer/ https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-...

aussieguy1234 5y ago

Many people might think something as massive as the ocean is basically unlimited and that there's no way us humans could screw it up. Not true. Take a sample of seawater from almost anywhere right now and you'll find microplastics. Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.

standardUser 5y ago
I can't understand this perspective at all, but it seems to have been a key philosophy guiding human development for a very long time. Was it just a belief based on convenience?
- _qwfv 5y ago
  It's a story as old as humanity. There's many examples of humans exhausting their nearby resources because they thought they were effectively infinite. Whether that's a forest, a food stock, a water source, or something else.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    And every time it's happened in the past, the solution has been to leave. There's always been somewhere else to go.
    - _qwfv 5y ago
      Not every time, or at least the solution doesn't always result in everyone surviving. The Mayan civilization, for instance, is thought to have exhausted their local resources and fallen apart as a result.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Easter Island is another example.
- rolleiflex 5y ago

cced 5y ago

Any insight on how this might impact the 3D printer space?

buildbot 5y ago
It probably won’t much, as the most common plastic is actually corn based (PLA) and IIRC, can be composted. Only commercially though https://www.3dnatives.com/en/pla-filament-230720194/ https://www.3dnatives.com/en/pla-filament-230720194/
delecti 5y ago
From TFA: > Under the proposed rules, Canada will ban six single-use plastic items, like straws and six-pack rings, create incentives for companies to use recycled plastic, and force plastic producers to pay for recycling I suspect it won't restrict 3d printing, but could conceivably increase prices for some materials.

caiob 5y ago

Great! More taxes out of thin air. We don’t have enough of those.

gtirloni 5y ago

I don't understand why a bunch of comments here are showing as downvoted. Is this a controversial topic by any means? Honest question.

slumpt_ 5y ago
HN can be a bit of a hive for libertarian-minded engineers. Regulation = bad, to hell with the nuance, etc.
- caenorst 5y ago
  I think it's more about anonymous down voting to be very enticing for people who "hate" certain ideologies. Which can go either side, regulation, unionization, I've seen both side comments been downvoted. But on both case, yup, to hell with the nuance.
- mlindner 5y ago
  There's not much nuance when a governmental agency puts "Plastic manufactured items" on the same list as "Asbestos", "Lead", and "Mercury".
  - slumpt_ 5y ago
    ok

swiley 5y ago

What the hell does it mean "plastics are toxic?" PS/ABS? Maybe Cellophane? That's just heavily processed wood.

hparadiz 5y ago

My car was recently hit while it was parked and the plastic trim under the front bumper started to come off by of course scraping against the road. It's not simple to remove either. I had to jack the car and remove some bolts from under it holding this plastic. I can only imagine how much micro plastics it spread all over the road and then of course washed into the ocean.

bioinformatics 5y ago

Looking forward to reduce plastic in the clinical and research settings. I think it's a great idea to elminate at least 99% of plastic in these environments. It will make patient treatment much more human, research much more transactional and pure, while eliminating pollution in most places.

nemo44x 5y ago

I thinking banning plastic straws will end up pushing the movement towards reduced plastic usage backwards. At least until there is a competent alternative. Paper straws are not it. Especially since straws aren’t even a real contributor or issue overall. But it’s not at all difficult for a populist or reactionary to hit a nerve with this kind of thing however well intentioned it is.

ciconia 5y ago

That's a great development, but I'm afraid in a way it's already a lost cause. That stuff is everywhere.

swader999 5y ago

Finally something good out of Ottawa. To be fair not much plastic ends up outside a landfill in Canada. But this is still the right way to go.

callamdelaney 5y ago

In the UK a granny can't buy a few vegetables without being charged a surcharge for the bag that's required; though corporations package food with thousands and thousands of tonnes of excess packaging with seemingly no additional charge. Where's the justice in this? Why charge the consumer when huge corporations like Asda, Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Sainsburys etc are happy to buy tonnes of plastic that's unnecessary and will be thrown away? Carrier bag charges are just posturing in the face of this.

motohagiography 5y ago

Even as someone who doesn't think highly of this admin or mo'jones, plastics are the crack cocaine of manufacturing, and of all the empty gestures this government has made, this is probably the most useful thing they could do. It's regressive in the sense that it will cause a hedonic hit to people who buy cheap things for comfort, but the majority of plastics begin and end their lives as disposable garbage. Let's just say when you clean up a park, creek, lake, or a beach, you don't end up with a collection of champagne bottles and caviar tins - it's all fast food bottles and containers. The next one would be concrete and laws about disposing of contaminated fill, because that's the huge environmental horror afflicting rural areas that is a direct result of a real estate bubble manufactured by their other policies, but it's a start.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
The problem with these kinds of things from this particular gov't is that they are spoken about and press releases are issued.... but they never actually happen. Electoral reform, indigenous reconciliation (or even just clean water for reserves), CO2 reductions, you name it... Ok, we did get cannabis legalization.
- ornornor 5y ago
  > cannabis legalization. Because there was so. much. money. in it. Both from tax revenue and from reduction in policing costs.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Honestly, it's what got them elected. I met lots of people who were going to vote NDP (many of my friends, coworkers) -- or not vote at all (trades people who were working on my house, people I talked to online etc.) -- who got out and voted Liberal because of this issue alone. It's been a few years now and the world hasn't ended and it doesn't feel like cannabis consumption is any higher really. It was probably good policy to do it. While the NDP (who were ahead of the Liberals in the polls at the beginning of that election and actually in majority territory) have always had legalization as policy, I bet you that Mulcair wouldn't have had the political confidence or buy-in from the provinces to get it through like Trudeau did.

danielrhodes 5y ago

I'm curious what is meant by "plastic" here - it would be a shame if they banned all plastics. Plastic as we know it comes in many varieties, depending on the use case. In general I think it refers to polyethylene. [1] However, it is also possible to produce plastics from hemp, which is vastly superior on many dimensions compared to what is common today. Hemp was just legalized in many US states in 2018 after having been banned in the 30s due to lobbying pressure from cotton manufacturers. Moreover, there are recyclable (and I assume less toxic) plastics produced from corn, which you might see in cups at forward-thinking shops. These plastics biodegrade significantly faster than petroleum-based alternatives. So hopefully any legislation is specific to plastics which are harmful. [1] The report here goes into more detail on which specific long-chain polymers are commonly found in pollutants: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/evaluating-existing-substances/science-assessment-plastic-pollution.html#toc5 https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...

mediaman 5y ago

There is a lot of misleading and false statements in this article. They claim plastic recycling doesn't work. It's true that most plastic isn't recycled, but that's because of lackluster government involvement, not some technological barrier. British Columbia has the most sophisticated recycling equipment in North America. Two plants there first use lasers to identify different types of plastic (PP, HDPE, PET, etc) in the incoming stream and then use air blasts to categorize it. These streams are then separated by color. The material then goes to a plastics reclamation facility where the material is shredded, washed, dried, melted and forced through a filter, and turned to pellet. The result is that 74% of plastic beverage containers in BC are recycled. Why isn't this done elsewhere? It's because BC has a tax on plastic packaging, and this tax money is then used to subsidize the loss from converting recyclables into new plastic pellet (the cost is higher than the revenue). And other governments don't want to do it, partly due to lobbying from plastics packaging manufacturers. Plastic recycling does work when society wants it to. But instead we turn to paper. Paper produces double the CO2 emissions of plastic, and it requires vastly more energy: a European study showed that switching to paper in Europe would consume 57% more energy and 61% more greenhouse gases from packaging than are produced today. In a world where human existence is threatened most likely from runaway climate change, this seems like a bad idea. And while we're so focused on transitioning plastic packaging to paper, we ignore the real problem with plastic in the oceans: plastic netting dumped from illegal fishing. Plastic netting wraps around animals and drowns or suffocates them. It can also drag along a seabed, killing the seabed life. But this is considered a difficult problem to solve (international waters, policing is difficult, etc) so we ignore it. The idea policy would be: 1. Tax plastic packaging. Use the tax money to pay for recycling that works, which has been proven to work. 2. Develop international treaties and enforcement mechanisms to prevent illegal fishing and find ways to reduce fish consumption. 3. Implement carbon taxes that reflect the cost to human survival imposed by any kind of packaging, or other activity, in accordance with the degree of GHG emission.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
74% is still a far cry from a solved problem - what do they do with the quarter that can't be recycled? Aluminium is actually 100% recyclable with some countries approaching 98%. Plastic has symbols that tell you what kind of plastic a given piece of packaging is made of, and the consumers need to figure out which kind are recyclable in their particular state or local area. Then some plastics are thermosetting and therefore unrecyclable - they have to be broken down through pyrolysis or similar. So while it's true that plastic recycling is possible, you have to: 1) sort out the random mish-mash that is the recycling system which vary by local area and are incomprehensible to consumers for the purposes of sorting. 2) Increase that 74% number to something in high-90's. Probably forbid unrecyclable plastics for single-use consumer goods and packaging, and somehow constrain the wild variety of plastics that enter the waste stream to a few known varieties that can be sorted 3) forbid items that shed microplastics like there is no tomorrow. This would include clothing made out of nylon? This seems very unpopular.

sangnoir 5y ago

I believe plastic may be human civilizations "Great Filter" - I'm only half-joking. In less than a century, we managed to put plastic everywhere on the planet, and microplastics everywhere inside our food sources and our bodies, including in placenta(!). Our reach exceeds our grasp, we do not yet know what dangers microplastics pose, and we do not have the technology to remediate it. Our reach exceeds our grasp. I do hope plastics end up more or less benign, but there is a very real possibility that humanities gravestone will read "Here lies human beings. They managed to make their way into low orbit and their only moon, but were felled by their discovery of synthetic polymers"

redisman 5y ago
It’s also possible once it saturates the ocean enough, it’ll get ingested by plankton which won’t survive much of it and then it’s game over for most life

userbinator 5y ago

"toxic"? My BS detector is off the scale on that one. Plastics are used precisely because they are inert and nonreactive. If you burn them you can definitely create toxins, but then why not declare wood toxic too.

droopyEyelids 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor Chemically pure hydrocarbon polymers may be inert and generally nonreactive, however pure polymers like nylon or polyester are virtually useless. Plastics only become useful when they're mixed with a vast array of plasticizers, conditioners, chain extenders and other industrial chemicals. And those chemicals absolutely leach out of the materials we laypeople refer to as 'plastics', even before you consider environmental factors that cause the materials to decay.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I'm not an expert or a chemist, but I have the impression that the leaching of chemicals from plastics should generally be in proportion to how soft and flexible they are. The first thing that comes to mind as full of "squishy" plastics is a typical automobile today, hence the "new car smell". People are also conditioned to think that more soft plastics means higher quality. But clothes and other things that don't smell and aren't squeezable would seem on the face of it to be unlikely hazards. We've got built in chemoreceptors, so why be paranoid as though we didn't? Are you aware of or concerned about PVC piping widely used for plumbing? Do you know of any practical plans for eliminating it?
  - userbinator 5y ago
    The most widely used plastic, polyethylene, does not require plasticisers at all; indeed it is in (soft) PVC that plasticisers are used the most: https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/multimedia_pub_fsf_60_01.html https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/mul...
5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

Tax the plastic, and let the market sort out the restrictions. Not only does it result in the most efficient way to "regulate", it results in tax revenue for the government, so they don't need to tax things like jobs.

DoingIsLearning 5y ago
I would go beyond that. On top of taxing plastic, we should also create a 'new' plastic quota. Petro-chemical industry makes profit only on new plastic not recycled plastic. They will forever fight this transition away from plastic. If you introduze a plastic 'from oil' quota, the Nestlé's and Unilever's of the world would have to bid for a share of new plastic in a "new plastic market", making plastic from oil more expensive. This would incentivize manufacturers to either create plastic return deposit schemes, or to recycle more plastic, or just straight move to glass/aluminium/paper. Edit: the point of this is that it would desincentivize manufacturers away from plastic while increasing the "per tonne" profit of petro-chemicals (who would be manufacturing a lot less).
lotsofpulp 5y ago
This has always been the solution, but politically untenable due to actually causing people to sacrifice. Want less carbon emissions? Tax the source of carbon emissions, I.e. fossil fuels. How much? Keep raising the tax until the consumption levels go down sufficiently. Same with plastic (although above solution would also prob solve plastics since they come from fossil fuels too). Bottom line, has and always been, we can’t afford to have this many people living this luxurious of a life (quarter acre lots, single family detached house with 2+ cars, constant AC, $50/hour commercial flights, $0.50 per mile travel costs by car, dialysis for 80+ year olds, etc). Assuming the goal is to leave the environment in the same condition for future generations. Recycling and reusing is far too little, reduce has been the only solution for a long time.

mlindner 5y ago

And on marches the steps of technology backwards. I guess the next thing is we'll be using tin cans again and diecast metal for most components?

redisman 5y ago
Considering long term impacts is hardly ludditism

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Everything could be sold again in glass containers with scratches for labels.

Isamu 5y ago

>declares plastics toxic I didn’t see where in the article that plastics in the environment were shown to be toxic. Can someone help point to the study this is based on?

dukeofdoom 5y ago

Things taste better from a glass bottle. Which is how most drinks would be sold. The only downside was broken glass everywhere. Not uncommon for kids getting serious cuts just playing in the neighbourhood couple times a year. Sometimes main arteries, and death was a possibility.

ashneo76 5y ago

YES! No to neutralize the opposition from the petrochemical industries, plastic, companies like coke which literally say " as long as there is recycling, pepper disposal of plastic is on the customers". Companies like that are rich by offloading the production cost in the environment which people have to pay

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

this is good as a way around the setback that occurred in the last year. Far as I can see on the ground, the whole environmental movement, climate change, plastics, oceans etc, was steadily ramping up more and more... Greta etc.... everyone using reusable grocery bags was a highly visible thing and then the pandemic/covid hit and all of a sudden we're all using plastic bags by the ton again and people are littering masks all over the city etc. No more reusable shopping bags, a ton more waste because everyone is at home, etc etc. Big set back.