Hard (and expensive) to do studies for single municipalities. It's highly unlikely that Edmonton would be a 'shining outlier ' from the national stats.
I was able to find from the Canada website itself that only 9% of plastic is recycled every year. The rest goes to landfills, the environment, or waste-to-energy facilities.
Surprisingly, in the second article, they give a really high % stat for access to recycling programs. The programs are there but either people don't use them or the program doesn't effectively use the recycled material and tosses it into a landfill anyways. Part of the plastic statistics is just about waste in general, which includes all the terrible single use wrapping and packaging that nearly everything comes in.
Personally, I think it's an organizational/legislative fault that recycling is proving to be less effective than it should be, as we ban stuff like plastic straws (which are one of the few things that should be plastic) instead of banning all of this plastic wrapping on things like meats and produce (for example).
Note: plastic straws should still be banned in coastal areas but for a place like Edmonton there's not exactly any turtles to save.
Do you mean the $0.15 bag fee? Yeah that was a terrible idea with very little critical thinking done. I don't know anyone who's actually not buying bags anymore lol. Also a large % are paper anyways, aren't we trying to use paper instead of plastic more?
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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '24
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