Proposed bill banning plastic waste exports misses ‘heart of the problem,’ MPs told

By Yasmine Ghania of Canada’s National Observer

Landfills such as this one in Indonesia contain plastic waste exported by Canada and the United States. Photo by Tom Fisk / Pexels

Environmental groups say a bill aiming to ban Canadian plastic waste from being sent abroad to poor countries is missing the wording needed to properly tackle the issue.

Bill C-204, sponsored by Conservative MP Scot Davidson, seeks to halt only the export of plastic waste labelled “for final disposal.”

“The biggest global problem which Mr. Davidson and others hope to address with this bill will not be addressed, because the bill currently only looks at exports for final disposal,” James Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network, told the environment parliamentary committee Monday. “The bill currently does not address the heart of the problem, which is exports for recycling.”

As noted by the Basel Action Network and other organizations, Canadian plastic is often mislabelled as recyclable — when it’s in fact contaminated — and gets shipped to countries that lack the proper infrastructure to effectively recycle mixed or contaminated plastic waste.

The result is waste being dumped on farmland or set on fire.