Watch above: There’s a movement underway to look at banning plastic bags. The Saskatchewan Waste Reduction Council says there are better ways to reduce the use of plastic bags than instituting a ban.
SASKATOON – The head of the Saskatchewan Waste Reduction Council (SWRC) has mixed feelings about a proposal to ban plastic grocery bags in Saskatoon.
“If you’re trying to keep the landfill from filling up, this isn’t the way to do it,” Joanne Fedyk told Global News, “because plastic bags as a percentage of what’s in the landfill is a very small amount.”
City Coun. Pat Lorje has proposed a ban on the bags as a way to cut down on litter. She points out plastic bags blowing out of the landfill are very unsightly.
Fedyk, who is executive director of the SWRC, says banning the bags would cut down on litter.
“Landfills have problems with plastic bags because they blow all over the place,” she said. “Recycling systems, plastic bags jam up everything,” she said. But she also agrees with a city report that a bag ban would not be cheap.
“Enforcement of it would be very expensive, because depending on how they set it up, going to every retail store, every grocery store and insisting they don’t use plastic bags anymore, something like that, that’s a lot of work, it affects a lot of people,” she said.
READ MORE: Plastic bags could be a thing of the past in Saskatchewan
The issue came up this week at a city committee, after a report looked into the pros and cons of a ban. The report says controls on plastic bags will be investigated in a larger report on waste management expected later this year.
Fedyk says there is a lot individuals can do, such as getting reusable bags.
“We could ban plastic bags in our house, we have lots of options,” she said.
But she points out if the main goal is reducing the amount of waste going into the landfill, there are much bigger problems than plastic bags.
“Let’s look at all the organics that go into the landfill, let’s look at all the paper and packaging that should be going into the recycling stream in the landfill, all of those things make up a much larger fraction of the waste stream than plastic bags do,” she said.
The city’s report on waste management is expected within a few months.
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