{"id":216580,"date":"2019-05-29T19:54:47","date_gmt":"2019-05-29T23:54:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=216580"},"modified":"2019-05-29T19:54:47","modified_gmt":"2019-05-29T23:54:47","slug":"canada-hasnt-issued-any-permits-for-companies-to-ship-waste-government-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2019\/05\/29\/canada-hasnt-issued-any-permits-for-companies-to-ship-waste-government-says\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada hasn’t issued any permits for companies to ship waste, government says"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said the government is still investigating the Malaysian situation \u2014 though the green plastic Loblaws bag and made-in-Canada stamps on other packages in the container make it difficult to deny where the waste originated. (File Photo<\/a>: Catherine McKenna\/Facebook<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

OTTAWA \u2014 The federal government has issued no permits for Canadian companies to ship trash overseas since regulations changed three years ago but Canadian garbage is still showing up unwanted in Asian nations.<\/p>\n

Canada\u00a0introduced new regulations in 2016 requiring exporters to get permits to ship waste other countries would consider hazardous, including trash. The changes were the result\u00a0of\u00a0the diplomatic dustup with the Philippines over 103 containers\u00a0of\u00a0trash that arrived in ports there in 2013 and 2014 wrongly labelled as plastics for recycling.<\/p>\n

The Liberals insist the changes will prevent another load\u00a0of\u00a0Canadian trash from hitting Asian ports but it appears they haven’t entirely.<\/p>\n

Malaysia this week is demanding\u00a0Canada\u00a0pay to take back a shipping container filled to bursting with plastic grocery bags and packaging the Malaysian government says is too contaminated to be recycled.<\/p>\n

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said the government is still investigating the Malaysian situation \u2014 though the green plastic Loblaws bag and made-in-Canada\u00a0stamps on other packages in the container make it difficult to deny where the waste originated.<\/p>\n

McKenna said there is clearly a \u201cbroader lesson\u201d for the world in all\u00a0of\u00a0this.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeveloping countries don’t want to receive plastic goods, they don’t want our waste,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She intends to unveil a strategy next month to get at the roots\u00a0of\u00a0the problem, including cutting down on the production and use\u00a0of\u00a0single-use plastics, putting more onus on producers\u00a0of\u00a0plastic to pay for the problem and improving recycling.<\/p>\n

This latest garbage embarrassment is shining new light on what Greenpeace\u00a0Canada\u00a0calls the \u201cmyth\u00a0of\u00a0recycling.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it is a shock to Canadians that we ship so much garbage overseas,\u201d said Sarah King, head\u00a0of\u00a0Greenpeace\u00a0Canada’s oceans and plastics campaign.<\/p>\n

Environmental Defence program director Keith Brooks says most Canadians have no idea that after they dutifully drop their plastic packages and soda cans into blue bins, a lot\u00a0of\u00a0them still end up in landfills or burned in far-flung countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe curtain has been pulled back or the wool’s been pulled off our eyes and we now see that ‘Oh my gosh this is totally not working the way that we thought it was working’ and we are contributors to a big problem,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are a global pariah as a result\u00a0of\u00a0exporting our contaminated plastic to less-developed countries. It’s shameful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Statistics\u00a0Canada\u00a0reports the country exported 44,800 tonnes\u00a0of\u00a0plastic waste in 2018, much\u00a0of\u00a0it to the United States. Once waste goes to the U.S. it is not tracked to determine what happens to it in the end. Brooks said plastics that originate in\u00a0Canada\u00a0are often mixed with American waste and then shipped to Asia.<\/p>\n

Greenpeace\u00a0Canada\u00a0also says the import data from the Malaysian government suggests Malaysia is documenting more waste-plastic imports from\u00a0Canada\u00a0than Statistics\u00a0Canada\u00a0is reporting as exports to Malaysia, raising doubt that\u00a0Canada\u00a0has any true understanding\u00a0of\u00a0what plastic waste is going out and where it is ending up.<\/p>\n

Canada\u00a0is not the only culprit.\u00a0Canada’s container was among 60 that Malaysia says were imported illegally from 14 different countries, including the United States, Japan, France, Australia and the United Kingdom. The Philippines has complained\u00a0of\u00a0illegal trash turning up from Australia and South Korea. Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand have all reported an increase in global garbage dumps, as unscrupulous business owners try to get in on the $3-billion trash industry.<\/p>\n

Both Malaysia and the Philippines are looking at their own importing businesses as part\u00a0of\u00a0the problem \u2014 companies that get paid to take plastics for recycling but then just dump them in landfills or burn them.<\/p>\n

The issue has become particularly bad since China, once the world’s largest importer\u00a0of\u00a0recycling plastics, slammed its doors to the materials last year. China found it was disposing more than it was recycling because the materials arriving in its ports were often too contaminated with food waste and non-recyclables to be useful.<\/p>\n

Greenpeace\u00a0Canada\u00a0says the countries sending trash also have a duty to investigate their side\u00a0of\u00a0the equation. King says\u00a0Canada’s Liberal government is talking a lot about the plastics problem but thus far hasn’t actually done anything about it.<\/p>\n

Canadians produce 3.25 million tonnes\u00a0of\u00a0plastic waste each year. Less than 10 per cent\u00a0of\u00a0the plastics Canadian toss out are diverted from landfills, and not all\u00a0of\u00a0what is diverted is actually recycled.<\/p>\n

King says there is just no way\u00a0Canada\u00a0can absorb the amount\u00a0of\u00a0plastic waste its people produce, and the idea that the material should be burned or recycled is missing the mark. Burning waste for energy comes with its own host\u00a0of\u00a0environmental problems, namely air, soil and water pollution, while recycling is just not working.<\/p>\n

King said\u00a0Canada\u00a0needs to ban the plastics that are the hardest to recycle \u2014 bags and heavy takeout-food containers as a start \u2014 and work towards producing products that can be reused instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OTTAWA \u2014 The federal government has issued no permits for Canadian companies to ship trash overseas since regulations changed three …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":211321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news-ca","category-news","mauthors-mia-rabson","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216581,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216580\/revisions\/216581"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}