GOLDSTEIN: PM’s single-use plastic ban is double bother for taxpayers

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As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau presses ahead with his plan to eliminate single-use plastics from the environment, his government says the policy will double the waste it generates and double the cost to taxpayers of getting rid of it.

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Meanwhile, its contribution to eliminating plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, lakes and rivers, which is the ostensible goal of the policy, will be nearly undetectable.

That would amount to a 3,000 cut from 1% of the global total of plastic waste, according to a new report from the Fraser Institute, “Canada’s Waste Plan to Regulate Plastic Waste.”

Author Kenneth Green points to an analysis of the regulatory impact of the Trudeau government’s policy to ban single-use plastics released on Christmas Day last year.

The government’s own analysis of its zero-plastic policy states: “The proposed laws would forestall roughly 1.6 million tons of plastic from getting into the waste system through the analytical interval (2023 to 2032), however would additionally add about 3.2 million tons of different supplies to the stream. Waste from utilizing alternate options, as a result of elevated unit weights relative to SUPS (single-use plastics).

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Supplies that will likely be used to interchange single-use plastics — outlined as grocery baggage, straws, chopsticks, cutlery, take-out containers, and six-pack rings — will embrace paper, wooden, molded fibres, aluminum and even different plastics.

It is going to additionally should be disposed of, and the Trudeau authorities’s report says this “increase in the amount of waste (will represent) additional costs to municipalities and county authorities, as they are usually responsible for managing the collection, transportation and burial of plastic waste, and will bear most of the related costs, which will eventually be transferred to taxpayers.”

The Trudeau authorities’s evaluation finds that the online price to Canadians of its laws banning single-use plastics will likely be $1.3 billion from 2023 to 2032 — twice the online financial savings of $619 million.

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Inexperienced famous that when the Trudeau authorities totally implements its plastic-free technique—which exceeds the six objects talked about within the authorities’s evaluation—the annual prices by 2030 will exceed the advantages by $300 million.

“Imposing costs to Canadian society that outweigh the benefits…fails the first and probably the most important test of sound public policy,” Inexperienced wrote.

He mentioned the Trudeau authorities’s Zero Plastic Waste 2030 plan – ZPW2030 for brief – “will produce little or no environmental profit as a result of Canada’s plastic economic system poses very small environmental dangers each domestically and globally.

“Only 1% of Canada’s waste plastic is released into the environment. The remaining 99% is disposed of safely from an environmental perspective – some are incinerated, others are recycled, but disposed of in landfills, which is an environmentally harmless end point. “

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All of this raises the question of why the prime minister is again imposing new costs on Canadians at a time of record inflation for nothing more than a token versus an actual benefit for the environment – much like his policy on climate change.

Alternatively, Green said, the Trudeau government should “consider dropping the plastic waste regulation scheme – a near-trivial environmental problem in Canada and as part of our global contribution to the plastic waste problem.”

“Alternatively, policy makers could consider ways to crack down on improper disposal of plastic waste (littering in general); and to improve street cleaning, municipal management and waste handling to prevent litter plastics from surviving in the environment.”