In the midst of this plastic festival of consumerism, there are a few shoppers trying to cut back on the waste.
It’s two weeks before Christmas, and Toronto’s Eaton Centre is decked with a 108-foot artificial tree and elephantine reindeer speckled with lights. Shoppers amble by, toting purchases in clusters of bags – a holiday parade of packaging.
There are plastic bags from Hudson’s Bay, Best Buy, Uniqlo and Indigo; paper from Pink, Brandy Melville, Williams Sonoma, Zara, Lush Cosmetics and Banana Republic. Most are destined for the landfill. So, too, is much of the packaging that’s inside them.
In the midst of this plastic festival of consumerism, there are a few shoppers trying to cut back on the waste. But only a few. Nazrana Mahjabeen, 35, is holding a reusable bag from shoestore chain B2, which she has filled with presents for her family. “I’m trying,” she says. “It’s not enough.” Then she holds up a plastic H&M bag.
This twinge of guilt is familiar to many shoppers. After a year of
climate strikes and
multiple warnings about the
urgent need for businesses to respond to climate change, surveys and retailers’ internal research suggest more consumers are thinking about sustainable shopping decisions – even if they aren’t doing much about it yet. It does not take a great cognitive leap for people to hear about an island of plastic in the sea – a floating Dorian Gray portrait for our consumer society – and to cast rueful glances at their own plastic grocery bags, Tim Hortons cups, shampoo bottles and takeout containers.
What we buy is not a small part of the problem: 47 per cent of total plastic waste in Canada comes from packaging, according to a study by Deloitte for the federal environment department. And there is little sign of progress. In a report last year, the International Energy Agency forecast that global oil demand for plastic production would surpass oil demand for road passenger transport by 205
Plastic is popular because it is lightweight, making it inexpensive and more fuel-efficient to ship, and cheap to produce. But its end-of-life footprint is abysmal. Over all, only 9 per cent of plastic in Canada is recycled after use, according to the Deloitte study, which estimated that 3,268 kilotonnes of plastics were discarded as waste in 2016. (That’s the equivalent, in weight, of about 24,000 empty Boeing 787 jets.) Because plastic is not as durable for recycling purposes as metal or glass, demand for recycled plastic is low, which contributes to waste. That problem has intensified since last year, when China said it would no longer buy recycling waste from other countries, including Canada.
Globally, only 14 per cent of all plastic packaging is collected for recycling, and even then, only 2 per cent of it ends up being repurposed as new packaging – while one-third of it ends up as litter somewhere in the environment, including the oceans, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. This British-based charity promotes the development of a more “circular economy,” a term referring to a system that minimizes waste by reusing materials as much as possible and recycling them effectively, rather than a system that relies on using products once or twice before disposing of them. The term is gaining popularity as concerns about climate change mount.