Canada Gets Back on the Reusable Bag Map!

Just a friendly reminder — the folks up in Canada are still thinking about plastic bags, a ban thereof, and what it means to their people. Unfortunately, today’s news from the icy north is bittersweet: while the city is still en route to banning the environmental nuisances, a new ordinance has pushed the ban’s start date back from April of next year to August.

City council recently gave first reading to a bylaw to end use of plastic shopping bags in the city.

And last Monday, council’s finance committee of the whole pushed the bylaw forward towards second reading after a public hearing on the issue, with one change and one request for clarification.

Managers from three of Iqaluit’s major retail stores were the only members of the public to address the meeting. They all supported the bylaw in principle, but had concerns about the enforcement date.

After the public hearing, the finance committee agreed to delay implementation from the originally scheduled April 1, 2009, to Aug. 1.

No! But why, Toronto? You’ve come so far, why put it off now? Apparently not everyone is ready for the intense and immediate change that a ban on plastic bags would bring. Which is to say — it would just be kind of a waste of the bags that are already in possession.

April 1 is “the middle of our year for the sealift,” explained Ian Hobbs, manager of D.J. Specialties, in requesting the date change.

He told the public hearing his company already has enough of the traditional plastic bags in stock to last until next July’s sealift delivery. That’s also when he’d like to bring in the reusable bags.

Hobbs said with the April deadline he would be left with thousands of single-use bags on hand, and would have to pay air-freight rates to bring in new bags.

It brings up an interesting point. Is it better to keep all of those extra bags on lockdown and start enforcing the bag ban in April, just to ensure they don’t make it out into our atmosphere? Or should we just let the disposable bags get some use as long as they’re already there? Might reasoning like this cause a never-ending cycling of “not having run out yet”? What do you think, readers? Leave a comment and let us know!

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 5:54 pm and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.