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More than 70 businesses, organizations and governments have come together to release an action plan, “Roadmap to 2025: A shared action plan to build a circular economy for plastics packaging,” designed to eliminate plastic waste through the Canada Plastics Pact(CPP). The plan represents cross-value chain collaboration toward a circular economy for plastics packaging in Canada to drive tangible change by 2025.
Industry, nongovernment organizations and public sector organizations, including brands, retailers, recyclers, resin producers, nonprofits, associations, governments and others that account for more than one-third of the plastics packaging on the market in Canada, developed the “Roadmap.”
“Our take-make-waste approach to plastics is no longer viable,” says George Roter, managing director of the CPP. “Plastic packaging is a vital part of daily life, it is high-performing, lightweight and low cost; but currently, over 85 percent of what we produce in Canada each year gets used once and ends up in landfills or the environment. Canadians, our governments and our businesses have had enough of plastic waste. The ‘Roadmap’ is designed to comprehensively address this problem quickly and together, and sets forth both coordinated individual business actions and the system changes that are needed into a single agenda, with ambitious targets for 2025."
The “Roadmap” establishes three strategic priorities for 2025:
- Reduce, reuse, collect – Eliminate unnecessary and hard-to-recycle plastics. Drive innovation for reuse and refill models. Innovate to prevent waste from being created in the first place. Improve collection and recycling systems.
- Optimize the recycling system – Develop packaging design standards to improve recyclability. Make investments in new infrastructure. Address supply and demand issues to incorporate recycled resins. Ensure government policy is in place and well-designed.
- Use data to improve the whole system – Create standard definitions and measurement practices. Drive investment in better real-time data and monitoring.
According to the CPP, innovation in technology and business models that will be generated through achieving a circular economy for plastics packaging will capture economic value, deliver jobs and position Canadian businesses competitively.
“Creating a future that is free of plastic waste demands collaboration, and the multistakeholder effort that went into developing the CPP ‘Roadmap’ gives me confidence that we can now make the essential steps to catalyze and create a circular economy for plastics,” says David Hughes, president and CEO of The Natural Step Canada. “We are excited to be working alongside other CPP partners and leading organizations across Canada’s plastics value chain to turn our ambitious targets into action and achieve together more than any one organization can do by acting alone. These are systemwide problems that require systemwide solutions.”
The CPP is following the precedents set in the roadmaps of other pacts across the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s global Plastics Pact Network to bring globally aligned direction and responses to plastic waste and pollution. The “Roadmap” is intended to accelerate progress toward the CPP’s four 2025 targets for plastics packaging and waste, which partners of the CPP are required to report on annually:
- Define a list of plastic packaging to be designated as problematic or unnecessary and take measures to eliminate them.
- Design all plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable.
- Ensure 50 percent of plastic packaging is effectively recycled or composted.
- Ensure 30 percent recycled content across all plastic packaging.
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