Most businesses in Edmonton are complying with the single-use items policy the city of Edmonton introduced two months ago, according to the city.
Edmonton city councillors heard an update on the bylaw at a utilities committee meeting Tuesday.
Seventy per cent of businesses are compliant with the bylaw, with all of the remaining ones working with the city to comply with the bylaw.
The city has a goal of reducing the disposal of single-use items 10 per cent by 2025.
To know if the city’s strategies are working, crews have started doing waste characterization studies – that is, studying the trash from both residential bins and from public garbage bins and seeing how many single-use items are tossed now compared to before the bylaw was introduced.
The city will also work with the capital clean-up crews to do a similar study on litter found on Edmonton’s streets.
Under the new bylaw, businesses must charge at least 15 cents for a paper shopping bag and at least $1 for a new reusable shopping bag, among other changes.
The charge on bags is meant to make people think twice about if they really need a bag, according to Dennis Jubinville, branch manager of waste services for the city.
“Changing behaviour is difficult, and if you give people the choice … it’s nice to have a bit of an incentive,” he said.
“Through history and through research, we found that a monetary incentive is helpful in enabling people in behaviour change.”
Though city staff weren’t able to name the company, they said a chain food vendor has reported a reduction in the number of bags it is ordering since the bylaw was put into place.
The charge for a bag is not collected by the city — it’s retained by the business, Jubinville said.
“As a city, we don’t have the authority to take that money and so we can’t take it in for environmental purposes,” he said.
“Our hope is that the businesses do use it for that purpose, that they use it to continue with their efforts to helping our environment, to reducing their packaging, to reducing their waste, and to align with the goals that we have across our city and our nation.”
Ward pihêsiwin Coun. Tim Cartmell said the bylaw has the right idea behind it but needs work.
“I think there’s a bit of a balance that we can strike here, and I don’t think we’ve struck it yet,” he said.
Cartmell said charging someone for a bag, and that money not necessarily going to an environmental purpose, is effectively penalizing them for making a more green choice.
“Something I hear a lot about this part of the bylaw is ‘You want us to move from plastic to paper, so we move to paper and you charge us,’” Cartmell said.
“‘You want us to move from a one-time bag to a reusable bag, and you charge us more. That’s not providing an incentive.”
The city said complaints to the city about the bylaw are also starting to decrease. The city received 256 complaints or inquiries on the bylaw in June, 536 in July and 122 in August.
Generally, the city receives more than 3,000 calls a month relating to waste, according to Alison Abbink, a city waste policy planner.
The bylaw will likely be amended in November to bring it in line with upcoming changes to the federal single-use item policy, the city said.