Thank you, Madam Chair.

I’d like to thank the members of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology for this study on economic recovery after COVID-19 and for having us here as a witness today.

My name is Alexander Kung. I am the director of sales and business development here at Tavos Industries. I want to take this opportunity today to share our experience this past year as a rather young company while navigating through the pandemic.

Tavos opened up its business in late 2018 as a manufacturer of paper alternatives. Our short-term goal is very simple. We want to educate and aid our own community in transitioning away from single-use plastics. Long term, we would like to see a complete halt of the use of single-use plastics by 2025.

We stepped into full manufacturing of green consumer products and packaging that would hopefully make a dent in our annual three million tonnes of plastic waste. We know that Canadians recycle only 9% of this plastic waste. We do we need to do better. We were very happy to see the government plan to ban single-use plastics back in 2019. We urge the Canadian government not to delay this any longer.

One of our next plans is to diversify from paper alternatives to bamboo products as well. We have several projects in our pipeline that target different single-use plastics in common households in the next few years. Unlike trees that take decades to come to fruition, bamboo is a fantastic alternative to single-use products.

I also want to touch on our experience as a younger company this past year, as we also did enter into a completely different new industry. When the pandemic began last March, our business essentially collapsed alongside the hospitality industry, when hotels, restaurants and bars were forced to close. This was very devastating for us, having to lay off a significant number of our employees and not knowing whether or not we would survive post-pandemic. We decided to temporarily pivot our business to manufacturing hand sanitizer and other PPE to assist in the massive shortages we saw in our community. This was very challenging for us as a young company, entering a completely different market, operating with 30% of our staff capacity and realizing the complete market domination of imported PPE.

As we started to manufacture our first PPE product, which was hand sanitizer, we witnessed hundreds of thousands of bottles thrown away around our own community. We believed there should be a better alternative to this. We decided to take it a step further and ditch the use of plastic bottles. We spent our first few months innovating and pioneering the first-ever single-use packet of sanitizer, which is made of 95% paper material. We are on track to manufacture a 100% completely biodegradable packet that can hold sanitizer as well.

As Canadians continued to purchase more, the demand grew for higher-quality, domestically made PPE. There were many instances in the past year where imported sanitizers contained traces of mercury, lead or methanol. This is very toxic to human skin. More recently, imported masks in Quebec contained graphene, which, if consumed in consistent or large amounts, could result in some lung damage.

All these problems resulted in an influx of new Canadian manufacturers. The industry itself did flourish. We partnered with members of the Canadian Association of PPE Manufacturers, CAPPEM for short, which is a rather newer association that employs over 1,000 Canadian PPE workers and aims to ensure that Canadians will never again be vulnerable to shortages of PPE during a time of pandemic or otherwise. We have also partnered up with several Canadian PPE manufacturers across the country to share our own resources and accessibility to certain products.

We also partnered up with a company that manufactures the Air Sniper. It's a very effective air sanitation device that uses UVC technology. In December 2020 it was tested and proven to kill COVID-19. The Air Sniper is a Canadian product manufactured in Alberta. It is a highly impactful solution that we have today that can allow our companies to open safely and help jump-start the economy. Unlike other air sanitization devices, it also produces zero ozone.

We recommend that the Canadian government not delay the ban on single-use plastics any longer; look inward when procuring for PPE, as Canadians are now more than capable of supplying domestic demand; and implement technologies like Air Snipers to help transition to opening our businesses safely in, hopefully, the final phase of this pandemic.

Thank you. I look forward to answering any questions.

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