convenience

Tuesday March 12, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday March 12, 2019

Ontario government ponders ban on single-use plastics

Ontario is weighing a ban on single-use plastics, which include bags, water bottles and straws.

April 24, 2018

Nearly a tonne of waste per person in Ontario is generated each year, and the rate at which that waste is diverted away from landfills — through recycling and composting, for example — has stalled around 30 per cent for the past 15 years.

The government recently released a discussion paper on reducing litter and waste,  and is asking the public and stakeholders for input on how to best address the problem. One question it asks is if a ban on single-use plastics would be effective in reducing plastic waste.

Environment Minister Rod Phillips said it’s an area in which the government is very open.

January 16, 2019

“We are essentially saying, ‘How would those work and how have they worked in other jurisdictions effectively?”‘ Phillips said in an interview. “Plastics is a priority from our government’s point of view, particularly as we talk about plastics in our waterways.”

It is estimated that almost 10,000 tonnes of plastic debris enter the Great Lakes each year, the discussion paper says. Ontario’s Blue Box recycling program recovers only about 28 per cent of all plastic packaging in the province.

Ontario is also mulling a deposit return system for plastic bottles and other containers, as is used in some other provinces.

March 6, 2015

Keith Brooks, programs director at Environmental Defence, said a lot of single-use plastics are unnecessary, pointing to straws and cutlery.

“I think that a ban on some single-use plastics makes a lot of sense,” he said. “I think it’s a good conversation to have.”

But by asking such a broad question, the answer may be no, Brooks cautioned, saying he didn’t think any jurisdiction has banned all single-use plastics.

“There’s some single-use plastics that are probably going to continue to be used…for food safety reasons and things like that,” he said, though he would push for them to be standardized and recyclable. (Source: CBC) 

 

Tuesday April 24, 2018

 

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday April 24, 2018

‘We need to rethink the entire plastics industry’: Why banning plastic straws isn’t enough

Britain announced this week that it plans to ban the sale of single-use plastic straws, as support for similar bans grows in Canada and around the world.

March 6, 2015

Advocates say such straw bans should help reduce plastic pollution that harms wildlife and ecosystems, but we need to monitor the effects of such policies. And they say bans may not be feasible for most of the plastics in our lives, so broader changes to the way we produce, consume and dispose of plastics are needed to make a real difference.

Jennifer Provencher, a postdoctoral researcher at Acadia University who studies the ingestion of plastic pollution by wildlife, said Britain’s ban is “an incredibly important step towards minimizing and using plastics more responsibly.”

She noted that single-use plastic items like straws and stir sticks are generally used only for a few minutes before they’re discarded, but can persist in the environment for centuries because plastics don’t typically decompose within a human lifetime.

Scientists estimate we’ve made 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic since the 1950s and 6.3 billion tonnes have already become waste.

More than 330,000 pieces of plastic and foam waste were picked off 2,800 kilometres of Canada’s shoreline by volunteers during beach cleanup events last year, including 17,654 straws — the ninth most common item found during cleanups supported by Ocean Wise and WWF-Canada. Worldwide, 409,087 straws and stirrers were picked up in beach cleanups around the world in 2017, the Ocean Conservancy reports.

Because of their small size, disposable straws are rarely recycled and often end up in the environment.

There, they can cause serious injuries to animals, as shown in a 2015 video that shows a straw being pulled out of a sea turtle’s nostril — the graphic, viral video has been viewed more than 21 million times. (Source: CBC) 

 

Friday, March 6, 2015

Friday, March 6, 2015Editorial cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, March 6, 2015

K-Cup creator John Sylvan regrets inventing Keurig coffee pod system

K-Cup creator John Sylvan regrets inventing Keurig coffee pod systemThe man who invented the K-Cup coffee pod almost 20 years ago says he regrets doing so, and he can’t understand the popularity of the products that critics decry as an environmental catastrophe.

John Sylvan worked at Keurig in the 1990s when he devised a simple product that could create a small mug of coffee out of a plastic pod. Originally aiming it at office workers, Sylvan said he thought the product might have some limited appeal to people who would normally go Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts or other coffee chains in the morning, because now they could get a cup of coffee at work that was cheaper, faster, and no fuss.

“That would make it environmentally neutral, because you wouldn’t have those Starbucks cups [everywhere],” Sylvan told the CBC’s As It Happens in an interview. “The first market was the office coffee service market,” he said, adding he is “absolutely mystified” by his product’s popularity in homes.

Popularity doesn’t begin to describe it, as the K-Cup’s status is closer to ubiquity. Keurig Green Mountain’s annual revenues have climbed to almost $5 billion, up more than five-fold in five years, largely on the back of selling billions of K-Cups every year.

Keurig dominates what’s come to be a large and growing market. Research firm NPD Group recently estimated that about 40 per cent of Canadian homes have a single-serving coffee machine, and Canadians spent $95 million on them last year.

According to a wildly popular ad campaign against the product earlier this year, there are so many discarded K-Cups that if you lined them up it would be enough to circle the earth more than 10 times — and that’s just from one year’s worth of coffee pods.

As the man who invented them, Sylvan might have been pleased with their popularity. But he left the company in 1997, selling his ownership of the product for $50,000.

To this day, he still doesn’t understand why people like them. “I find them rather expensive,” he said. (Source: CBC News)