Thank you so much.

Hello, everyone. My name is Mohammad Arjmand. I'm an assistant professor and the lead of the plastic recycling research cluster at the University of British Columbia.

I have some important remarks regarding plastics recycling in terms of what I have faced over the last several years in working in this area. Plastic waste and pollution have been acknowledged as the second most important global environmental and social issue in the 21st century, after climate change.

We know that in the Canadian context, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada, over three million tonnes of plastic waste is thrown away. The vast majority ends up in landfills, and about 29,000 tonnes find their way into our natural environment. Plastic waste is a matter of concern for Canadians, given that only 9% of plastic waste is recycled, 12% is incinerated and the remaining 79% is dumped into landfills.

According to the Government of Canada, the government plans to achieve zero plastic waste by 2030. Nevertheless, this challenge is highly reliant on the collaboration of federal, provincial and territorial governments, in conjunction with the public, academia and engaged industry members. As articulated in the Canada-wide action plan by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, there are three interrelated themes that should be thought of in this area: One is prevention, the second one is collection and the third one is recovery.

We need to remember that replacing plastics with alternative materials such as glass or metal containers is not an option. It is not an environmentally sustainable solution because they are considerably heavier, thus contributing to higher carbon dioxide emissions during transportation, which might affect our planet.

Canada is working in the area of replacing this plastic waste with bio-based plastics. We have a lot of forests, and we can do a lot of good work in this area. There are a couple of challenges that we need to consider. First, the physical properties we are receiving from bio-based plastics are usually not as good as petroleum-based plastics. That's part number one. Second, the amount of material we are producing through bio-based plastic still cannot compete with the petroleum-based plastics. That's the second problem we have in this area. The third part is the cost, which we need to consider. Still, I believe we have had huge improvements in the area of bio-based plastics, but there is way more to go.

I mentioned that there are three main strategies to tackle plastic waste. One of them is collection. It should be mentioned that over 15% of total generated plastic waste worldwide is collected for recycling. That is 55 million tonnes out of 353 million tonnes. The challenge is that, due to deficient proper collection mechanisms, 30 million tonnes of plastic just can't progress to the next stage, and around 20 million tonnes of plastic are being thrown away or wasted. I don't think that in Canada we are actually doing a much better job compared to the numbers that we have across the world.

There are some strategies being applied right now. They are usually governed by the government. One of them is a deposit refund or buyback to collect the plastics. We need to work more in the area of collecting plastics, but there are more factors to be considered. One of them is the behavioural change that we need to work on with people. Policy-making is very important to consider. There are some other parameters as well, which I have provided in my report. That's part number one, about collecting plastic.

The second part is that even if the plastics are collected, the next step is plastic sorting. Mostly, the plastic sorting right now is being done by human beings. It's not efficient, particularly when we are working on a large scale. European countries have done a very good job, particularly countries such as Finland. They have come up with some robotic systems to improve sorting and separating plastics.

After the sorting, we need to work on other parts, such as decontamination. There are some additives inside the plastic that need to be decontaminated. Sometimes we have adhesives or tags attached, and some of the plastic could be greasy. Cleaning these plastics could actually create a secondary source of pollution as well. I believe this is not established in Canada right now.

Suppose that we can solve this problem to collect the plastics in an efficient way. We can separate the plastics and clean them. Then the third step is recycling. We need to do mechanical recycling, as it is the easiest way of recycling plastics.

Basically, what we do, and what we have done over the last several years in my research group and all across Canada, is reprocess the plastic and convert it into value-added products—

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