When the federal government unveiled plans this spring to ban shopping bags and other single-use plastics, Calgary Cooperative Society Ltd executives weren’t particularly worried. The grocery chain, which operates dozens of supermarkets, liquor stores, cannabis stores and gas stations, switched from plastic shopping bags to biodegradable ones a few years ago.
“We didn’t believe for a second that our bags would suffer in any way,” said CEO Ken Keeler. “It’s about plastic, and it’s not plastic.”
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But an official rule published in the Canada Gazette in June said there was insufficient evidence that plant-based “compostable” plastic alternatives are completely biodegradable. As a result, Calgary Co-op bags and the like will be disposed of “in the same way as ordinary plastic bags,” according to the government. In other words, they will be banned from the end of next year.
“We thought, ‘No way. It’s impossible,” Keeler said. “We all looked at each other and said: “We did everything right. We can’t be included.”
The Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers (CFIG) has decided to support the Calgary cooperative’s fight, warning that a compostable bag ban could affect grocers across the country.
“I have to imagine there will be hundreds of businesses in Canada that are in the same position as Calgary co-ops and they don’t realize it,” said Gary Sands, senior vice president of CFIG. “We want more businesses to have an opportunity to recognize this and support what we say.”
Sands, who also met with government officials on the matter, said it makes no sense to hold public consultations on the rules between October and December 2020. The government is also holding additional consultations at the end of 2021.
“They did this consultation during COVID,” he said. “The last thing (grocers) wanted was plastic bags. They survived.”
”The Government of Canada has no plans at this time to revise existing regulations,” Cecilia Parsons, spokeswoman for Environment and Climate Change Canada, said in an email Thursday.
Compostable plastics can end up in recycling plants and contaminate real plastic, she says, and they’re also often thrown out of composting plants because they take longer to decompose than food or garden waste.
“And they have not been proven to work better than conventional plastics by littering the ground or water,” she said.
But Calgary Co-op said its bags are an example of one company and one household waste system working together to solve these problems. Since switching to compostable plastic bags in 2020, more than 100 million plastic bags have been prevented, the company says.
Rob Morphew, the company’s director of health, safety and the environment, said he has been working with the city to keep packages from reaching recycling facilities. The trick, he says, is for the Co-op to make sure the bags are suitable for use as liners for the compost bins the city distributes to residents to use in their kitchens.
“If they end up in a processing facility, we will know about it because it doesn’t work,” he said.
The City of Calgary has tested co-op bags at its municipal composting facility and found that they decompose successfully, City of Calgary spokesman Jaime Stopa said in an email.
The federal government’s ban will halt the production of all domestic plastic shopping bags by the end of the year. Stores must stop using them by December 2023, and manufacturers must stop exporting them by the end of 2025.
Manufacturers supplying Calgary Co-op will lose about half of their sales due to the ban, said Jerry Gao, CEO and founder of Leaf Environmental Products Inc. from Calgary.
Gao said a ban on compostable bags would also cool innovation in Canada, which could become a leader in compostable plastics because they are often made using starch from corn, a crop that is plentiful here.
But allowing compostable plastics to be used could backfire, especially without a strong public education campaign explaining how best to recycle them, said an engineering professor who studies the materials.
Mohini Sign, professor of mechanical and industrial engineering who heads the Center for Biocomposites and Biomaterials Processing at the University of Toronto, says just because a bag is labeled biodegradable or compostable doesn’t mean it will easily break down in landfills.
“It can biodegrade, but not immediately in the long term,” he said, adding that composting plants use enzymes to break down the material. “You need a certain enzyme, a bug, to eat it. And this beetle probably isn’t in the landfill.”
Thain also questioned the government’s total ban on compostable plastic. If you are concerned about whether a material is fully compostable, this can be clearly stated using “recognized” standard tests developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials.
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Post time: Feb-17-2023