Canada Plastics Pact announces Groundbreaking Industry Wide Action Plan to address Plastic Waste

A new shared action plan will drive leading organizations across Canada as they build a circular economy for plastics packaging

Over 70 leading businesses, organizations, and governments have come together to release an ambitious action plan to eliminate plastic waste through the Canada Plastics Pact. Roadmap to 2025: A shared action plan to build a circular economy for plastics packaging represents unprecedented cross-value chain collaboration, uniting key players behind a shared vision for a circular economy for plastics packaging in Canada and a targeted plan to drive tangible change by 2025.

“Our take-make-waste approach to plastics is no longer viable. Plastic packaging is a vital part of daily life, it is high-performing, lightweight, and low cost; but currently, over 85% of what we produce in Canada each year gets used once and ends up in landfills or the environment,” says George Roter, Managing Director of the CPP. “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 presents a full picture of what is needed to aggressively advance action and what can be done next to achieve a circular economy for plastics packaging through three strategic priorities for 2025:

1.   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.

2.   Optimize the recycling system: Packaging design standards to improve recyclability. Investments in new infrastructure. Address supply and demand issues to incorporate recycled resins. Ensure government policy is in place and well-designed.

3.   Use data to improve the whole system: Create standard definitions and measurement practices. Drive investment in better real-time data and monitoring.

Read the full media release here.

Special mention to our Burnaby Board of Trade members who have signed on as Canada Plastics Pact Partners:
Metro Vancouver | Return-It | SPUD | Save-On-Foods