I'
with all our plastic.
Only 9 per cent of it - 9 per cent - gets recycled.
♪ ♪
Okay. So what's going on here?
Here we are thinking we're doing the best thing for the planet,
cleaning, scrubbing, sorting all this plastic,
when in reality this could all just be for nothing.
WTF, Canada?
I thought we were better than this.
If this isn't actually going to get recycled,
why bother?
And if it doesn't get recycled, where's it even going?
David: Kirkland, that's the brand for Costco.
And where is this from? Niagara Falls.
All right. Let's go.
♪ ♪
You recently went to Malaysia.
Why did you go?
David:
in our blue box, recycling, plastic, that kind of thing,
was ending up in Asian countries,
and we'd heard that some of it could be going to Malaysia.
So we wanted to go there to find out
is Canadian stuff going there,
and if so why there?
How's it happening, and what are they doing about it,
and what are the impacts to the people who live there?
Right. So is Canadian plastic there?
Yeah, absolutely.
Unfortunately, we found a lot of it.
We found shipping containers full at ports.
We went to big giant, like, multi-storey mountains
that are just filled with plastic,
a lot of it from North America.
Some of it certainly from Canada.
California. Denmark. U.K.
From Britain.
A flipper.
Scuba flipper.
Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart.ca.
Safeway, proudly Canadian. So...English and French.
That's Canadian.
That's for crime stoppers in Canada.
This is Real Canadian Superstore.
Canadian, after Canadian, after Canadian.
So if you have a water bottle,
you don't want it to cost more
than the cost of a water bottle to recycle it.
You send it to a place like Malaysia,
and you have a lower labour cost, but you also have
sometimes, more lax standards, or more people willing to break
the law around health and safety.
So how is our plastic waste affecting
the people of that region?
Like, look at this.
What happens a lot of the time is it just gets burned.
And so those recyclers will take the most valuable parts,
they'll reprocess that, anything else they burn.
And so that creates toxic smoke right where people live.
It pollutes the waterways.
You can see tiny little bits of plastic,
plastic that could have been our salad container,
or our grocery bag, or our toy container just a few months ago.
Now it's in Malaysia, cut up, and floating down their waters.
9 per cent of the plastic we use in Canada gets recycled.
Is there any point to recycling if the numbers are this low,
and it's having this effect?
It's a good question.
It's discouraging to see your stuff not being recycled.
So a lot of people will say keep doing recycling,
but don't focus on recycling.
Focus on the thing that's supposed to be at the top.
Reducing the amount of plastic we use,
and then reusing the plastic that you already have.
Only then should you recycle it.
The challenge is that we in Canada
aren't reducing our plastic.
We're using more and more of it every year.
We use it for all sorts of things.
Sometimes it's in our homes,
Sometimes in places where people work.
And if we continue to use more, and more, and more,
well, there aren't enough places to put it,
and there's not enough of a case, it's like,
it costs too much money to recycle it.
And so we're just creating more and more pollution.
[tape rewinding]
Saara:
thinking about things differently.
Instead of focusing on washing the container,
I should refill it, or maybe I shouldn't be buying products
that come in plastic in the first place.
That is not going to be easy, but there are some little things
I can do, like using a reusable water bottle,
or bringing my reusable bags to the mall.
What do you think?
What are some small things you can do every day
to limit the amount of plastic you use?
Tell us what you think at
For
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