No more plastic bags, foam food containers should city council implement new bylaw

The city hopes to lessen the impact single-use items like plastic bags, straws, and food containers have on Edmonton landfills.

Waste Services is proposing a single-use item reduction strategy for council to consider that would ban foam containers and plastic shopping bags, in addition to encouraging the use of reusable bags at stores and cups at restaurants.

According to Jodi Goebel, waste strategy director, the city estimates 450 million single-use items are thrown in the garbage in Edmonton annually — translating to approximately 1.2 million products per day.

For Goebel, the hope with the proposed bylaw is to reduce the reliance on all single-use items and not simply move from plastic to other products like bamboo, wood, or other biodegradable options.

"We are not looking at shifting from one material from another," Goebel said. "What we want to see is that single-use fork, whatever it's made of, be replaced with something that is used over and over again."

"This plan is really about how do we recommend balancing our environmental objectives with the needs of Edmontonians so that we're seeing fewer of those items used and fewer of those items ending up in landfills," she added.

The bylaw recommendations include waste reduction measures for shopping bags, foodware accessories like utensils or straws, polystyrene foam cups and containers, and other disposable non-foam cups.

For shopping bags, administration recommends city council bans plastic shopping bags and implement a mandatory minimum fee on paper shopping bags and reusable bags to encourage the shift away from using single-use bags.

The recommended minimum fee for a paper shopping bag would be 15 cents in the first year and 25 cents in subsequent years. The minimum fee for a reusable shopping bag would be $1 in the first year and $2 in subsequent years.

Revenue generated from the fees would not be remitted to the city but would be kept by the respective business. Registered non-profits would be exempt from charging the fees on single-use items.

Should the recommendations pass, the bylaw would make it mandatory for customers to request required single-use accessories like straws or forks.

The bylaw would require reusable cups to be used for dine-in orders at restaurants and that restaurants accept reusable cups of a reasonable size that are clean from customers for dine-in and take-out orders.

"We are really talking about single-use items that are used for convenience, so things like plastic shopping bags and utensils," Goebel said. We are really trying to shift habits, and as we shift habits, we will see how far the community takes us."

Goebel said the bylaw recommendations would not apply to businesses like food courts, movie theatres, or stadiums due to capacity challenges.

"We want to get there eventually," she said. "We just recognize that we can't simply flip the switch and have everything change at once."

City administration says it will not regulate non-foam single-use food containers since there are "limited" alternatives available to businesses and that many restaurants continue to face "significant challenges" from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Initially, the bylaw was going to create a minimum fee of 25 cents for disposable cups to encourage the switch to reusable ones. The latest recommendations council will consider do not include that provision.

According to the city's 25-year waste strategy, the overall reduction target is to reduce waste generation per capita by 20 per cent by 2044.

The bylaw recommendations will go before the city's utility committee on March 25. Should the committee approve them, administration would draft a final bylaw to go before council for final say sometime in the fall after public engagement.

The city plans to create a grace period for the first year the bylaw is in place to give operators time to pivot, with full implementation expected in 2023. 

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Jessica Robb