Wonderful.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear.

The Smart Prosperity Institute is a clean economy research network and think tank at the University of Ottawa. We've appeared in front of this committee and the Senate committee on issues such as this quite regularly. Carbon pricing and climate policy, clean innovation and environmental impact assessment are some of the different areas that we do research on. We focus on public policy research to grow the economy and to protect the environment concurrently. We're evidence-based and non-partisan.

One of the major areas that we've turned our minds to now is the circular economy and plastics waste. We're active on the issue, both as a research institute and as part of the Circular Economy Leadership Coalition. I'll speak about that coalition briefly in my remarks as I go on.

As you noted, Mr. Chair, I'm here with my colleague Usman Valiante. Usman is one of Canada's foremost experts on the policies that we can use to manage plastics waste, and he was the lead author on the major report we released on the topic. I have copies of that if people are interested. Usman will participate in the question and answer period.

I should say thank you to the clerk and to the chair for accommodating that request at the last minute. It's an idea that I kind of had at 2 o'clock on a Sunday, so thank you for getting him on the line for this.

In my remarks, I'll speak quickly on three issues. First, I'll tell you why there's such a significant corporate and civil society interest in plastics right now. Second, I'll talk about the policies that government can activate in order to make progress on the issue. Finally, I'll share some thoughts on the role that civil society and business can play—complementing the government role—to help move this issue along.

First, Environment Canada testified earlier on the urgency of the issues, the actions the government is taking, the science behind it all and the commitments we've taken on, so I won't spend much time on this. I just want to convey a couple of points that are perhaps supplemental to that.

At SPI, at my institute, we tend to focus on issues where we see an environmental problem and a significant economic opportunity that can be realized in addressing that problem. With regard to plastics, studies have shown that, globally, somewhere between $100 billion and $150 billion of economic activity is jeopardized by allowing plastics to be disposed of and not reused. There's a huge economic potential in addressing this issue. As Ms. Ryan mentioned, we're capturing only about 12% of plastics within the recycling system in Canada. The exact amount is debatable, but a significant part of that 12%, even, is not actually recovered and reused within the recycling system.

It's partly due to this that we launched the Circular Economy Leadership Coalition last year at the G7 environment ministers' meeting in Halifax. I won't go into the details of this, but you can visit the website. It's an initiative made up of some of Canada's largest and most significant retailers and civil society organizations. It's chaired by Unilever Canada and The Natural Step Canada, and it's working to make Canada a world leader in a sustainable, prosperous, zero-waste, low-carbon emissions circular economy.

My second point—probably the most salient to the work that you're undertaking now—is what governments can do on this issue. I have copies of our policy brief, and we can answer more questions on that. We looked at six policies that governments at different levels can activate in order to make progress on plastics. They're designed to reduce the waste of plastics and recapture the value of those plastics back into our economy.

The first is a broad class of policies that assign property rights and responsibilities to end-of-life plastics. Extended producer responsibility was mentioned, and it's the most significant of these and the most commonly cited. It induces producers of plastics to be responsible for the end-of-life phase of their products, and the result is that there's a supply of reused plastics that become available for manufacturing and available to the economy—again, recirculating them through the economy. British Columbia has probably the most cited and best-known set of EPR programs in the country, but there is little question—I'd say no question—that there aren't enough of these in the country, and that the ones we have aren't working well enough and are too fragmented to really be able to achieve the levels of plastics waste reduction that we want to achieve across the country.

The second set of policies gets to one of the questions that one of the members asked earlier. They are policies that set recycled content performance standards. They either set a minimum percentage of recycled content that has to be in a product or in packaging, or they can operate as a tax mechanism whereby you pay less and less tax the closer your recycled content comes to the legislated or government-sanctioned standard.

There is a third set of policies we look at, and this is going to sound a little bit administrative and bureaucratic, but it's actually incredibly important. Government has a really significant role in creating common definitions, performance standards, and measurement and assessment protocols. Those really are the keys to enabling policies to operate harmoniously across the country or across an economy. Without them, you really fall, in this area, into fragmented systems and fragmented markets and policy directions. From Ms. Ryan's remarks, you can see the incredible suite of policies and actions that can be activated for plastics waste. Having some level of consistency across them becomes really important to the market actors who are out there trying to respond to them.

The last three we looked at—I'll be really brief—are prohibitions or bans on certain plastics, economic instruments to internalize the costs, and pricing for greenhouse gas emissions associated with the burning of plastics.

My last point—and I'll be extremely brief on this, Mr. Chair—is about what organizations like ours or coalitions like the ones we put together, or other civil society organizations that are out there, can do to help on this. I suggest that the federal government needs to think creatively about how to use outside-of-government organizations. As I alluded to, and as you can draw from Ms. Ryan's remarks, a lot of action is needed at different levels of government, and the risk of differing or non-aligned market signals is really significant. Some of the outside-of-government players can play a role in raising awareness about the solutions that can be activated and in socializing some of those solutions for politicians; in research that helps inform government policies and business practices; and in developing some of the solutions and policy frameworks. One example that a lot of people cite is the UK Plastics Pact, which in the U.K. is incentivizing businesses to reduce their plastic waste.

Thank you.

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