The big polluters need to be held accountable for the waste being generated worldwide
By Letter to the Editor on December 9, 2021.
Editor:
Once again, the low hanging fruit gets picked and kicked to the curb! Samantha Bayard, spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada said recently: Canadians expect the government………..to reduce plastic pollution……” Sure, but Bayard and company will accomplish nothing measurable by banning straws and grocery bags.
Despite the sell job, those two items on the death list in 2022, will not remotely help mitigate global pollution.
What I’d like to see, (perhaps beginning locally) is straws, grocery bags and like items have a bounty placed on them just as beverage containers do.
Beverage containers and milk cartons aren’t cluttering the landscape?
Why? Because they’ve been commodified. Everyone competes when such things become redeemable for cash.
What governments at every level are not solving is the worldwide annual massive mountain ranges of plastic and general waste generated by big polluters, (well over 90 per cent)!
They’re the culprits murdering landfills, oceans/rivers, soil and air! Institutions (hospitals, etc) construction companies, demolition concerns, industries of every type imaginable, worldwide electronics goliaths, auto manufacturers, etc., all have blood on their hands, as do governments at every level the world over, ignoring countless devastations, knowingly or unknowingly!
They know – if big players are accountable equally, not many “Canadians expecting the government to take action….” would love what they get back in their modified “plastics”. Some do better – we must do better. Germany in 1991, introduced an Extended Producer Responsibly (EPR) act, shifting responsibility for millions of tonnes of packaging stream waste (and other junk) produced annually, right back where it belongs – on the lap of those producing it. Check your box of chocolates this Christmas – it’ll likely be one quarter to one-third full of air and worthless plastic.
Scams like that in the millions are not only frauds but tragedies of industrial packaging waste, obfuscations and cost of disposal not being addressed (properly) by prevailing governments – and it should.
Straws, coffee cup lids, sandwich bags, the ubiquitous grocery bag – those wicked seven plastic groups – all take the hit, but until the general citizenry rise to protest the unrelenting attack on wallet and environment – forget moving the needle on pollution downward until the big boys are “forced” to play.
Alvin W. Shier
Lethbridge
-1
“Top-emitting Alberta oilsands site got government relief from pollution payments, Reuters reports”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/top-emitting-oilsands-site-collects-government-relief-from-pollution-payments-1.6277844
Nice, for us taxpayers eh? At least us who do pay our fair share…..
fine letter, and thanks for the link, so.ab.
dump a bag full of fast food waste, get caught, and be subject to several hundred dollars in fine. and, rightly so. create/dump millions of times that, and nada, or, even get a subsidy. maybe we are going to wake up? soon?
there are many things that need to be scaled back, including our choices to consume wants. a big step forward is in the area of packaging. oh, so much packaging.
very true.