After reading the proposal,…

After reading the proposal, it would seem as though "delay" and "removal" of important waste-reduction measures are the goal. Five years or never is a long time to postpone what has already been put off or ignored for decades. While I admit that this is a time at which some sectors find their economic situation very challenging, "some" is not "all", and many sectors continue to make significant profits. At the very least, a shorter postponement to problem-solve is called for.

First, and most importantly, without our environment, we have nothing. Profits don't matter if there are plastics in our food, water, and bodies - a far more existential concern.

Residents and municipalities have borne the cost, in time and money, of waste reduction, sorting, and recycling long enough. Corporations, with impunity and for far too long, have produced these environmentally damaging, non-biodegradable or non-recylable materials without having to find solutions to the resulting problems. It's behind time for them to invest in cleaning up the mess they've created.

Similarly, while large institutions may have real difficulties sorting waste, that doesn't excuse them from needing to solve that problem. As an example, I work at a college. I see every day that students can't always be counted on to sort waste. However, students ARE, paradoxically, also really great at caring about the environment and many are dedicated sorters. They CAN be given provincially or corporately sponsored on-campus jobs to sort waste. Campuses can ramp up availability of diverse bin types with clear signage for sorting. Students can be much better educated about the necessity of doing so and the associated costs of both doing and not doing so. A second type of institution your proposal excuses is LTC or retirement homes. My mom has dementia and lives in long-term care. Dementia patients can't be counted on to sort waste - that's fair. But residents of care homes who do not have dementia CAN be required to sort their waste, as can staff in any facility. In my mom's previous retirement home, new residents were not given recycling bins, compost bins, nor instructions for sorting garbage. They were given single garbage cans. So if they had been sorting and recycling in their own homes before moving in, they were now free to stop doing that and to get out of that habit. Why would we go backwards?

The beverage container issue was entirely foreseeable! By all means, let's take good jobs away from the LCBO and Beer Stores, at which returns for re-use have been the norm for ages, and instead, let's put booze in corner stores, where mixed bins with soiled recyclables that can't be reclaimed is the norm. I can't begin to convey the depth of my resentment at this government's short-sightedness at my fellow citizens' and at municipalities' expense. Additionally, the issue of non-alcoholic beverages in plastic bottles is about reducing and/or reusing first. Not just recycling. And some countries are having success with that. According to the CBC, "In Latin America, for example, Coca-Cola Brazil invested roughly $425 million US in a returnable plastic bottle program. The consumer pays an indirect deposit (a fee built into the price) when buying the drink and then gets a discount on their next purchase when the bottle is returned. The bottles are then cleaned and reused. The company says it's seen a 90 per cent return rate. On Oct. 23, Coca-Cola also announced its new "packageless" drink technology in Canada. Customers can buy a reusable cup that has a radio-frequency identification (RFID) and is synced to the company's Freestyle machines. The machines, which are already found in some movie theatres and restaurants across the country, allow a customer to pour a drink into the bottle and charge it to their account." Beverage companies need to step up and expand these initiatives.

In my own city of Hamilton, where we are already faced with pollutants from industry and already trying to create "clean steel" and to lower emissions, the proposal would allow incineration of some products rather than reuse or recycling. This would have a negative effect on our air quality, especially if plastics were involved.

Please don't keep kicking this massive environmental problem down the road. My daughter and her children and their children don't deserve to live with that.