Plastic waste may be the flavour of the month (literally) but the issues are far larger than what ends up in our rivers, lakes, oceans and stomachs. The real issues are our consumption habits and our use of natural resources, and the impact this is having on climate change. Which means there’s far more involved here than just plastics and packaging.

As a former participant on Canada’s National Task Force on Packaging (NAPP), I can attest to the frustrations of grappling with multiple issues on several inter-related fronts at the same time. But, as well as meeting its waste diversion target (ahead of time), NAPP also brought a whole bunch of different people together (three levels of government, various industry players, and environmental groups) that worked well and achieved quite a lot. I’m still friends with some of them!

Seriously though, given that environmental groups and some business leaders are now calling for national solutions and national targets for plastics, and national protocols and national definitions; and that whatever might happen with a plastics plan is going to impact other materials (for example, definitions of recycling); is there any appetite for creating a national task force on Canadian waste in general?

Just floating the idea. Seems to me we need to get our heads together and come up with practical solutions to the problems we’ve created. Aspirational goals are one thing and we don’t want an endless talk shop. But talking with each other and understanding where everyone is coming from, and discussing possible options, is always a useful exercise.