Thank you, Chair.
Good afternoon. Thank you for your time and for allowing me to come and speak with this committee.
As the health, safety and environment director with Calgary Co-op, I was charged with putting this program into place, taking the time to research the product that needed to be there and bringing it forward. I hope this committee will see the benefit and the effort of individuals and businesses in removing plastics where they can find viable alternatives.
Owned by members, Calgary Co-op is now the largest retail co-operative in North America with over 440,000 members, 3,850 employees, assets of $627 million and over $1.2 billion in sales. Our locations in Calgary, Airdrie, Cochrane, High River, Okotoks and Strathmore include food stores; pharmacies; gas bars; car washes; home health care centres; wine, spirits and beer locations; cannabis locations; Community Natural Foods; Beacon Pharmacy; a majority of Care Pharmacies; and Willow Park Wines and Spirits.
When we introduced this fully compostable bag in April 2019 and fully eliminated single-use plastic shopping bags from our lines of business in January 2020, we started down a path to eliminate 33 million plastic bags going to landfills annually, and since then, we've removed over 100 million plastic bags from landfills since we introduced 100% compostable shopping bags in 2019. We did this because we believed strongly that this was the right thing to do for our community and for our planet.
In creating this program, we worked closely with the City of Calgary to ensure our bag design would be compatible with local composting facilities and would break down easily within their 28-day cycle before we introduced them into the community. We continue to work with the City of Calgary to ensure that they still break down in its facilities. Our bag contains a stamp of approval from the City of Calgary as evidence that it will accept them at its facilities.
Following our switch to the fully compostable bags, we were thrilled to hear from our thousands of members that they found multiple second and third uses for our compostable bags. These included bin liners for the household bins, using them for pet and garden waste or bringing stuff back to the store if they needed to do that. There were multiple uses. They weren't just taking them home and throwing them into the recycle bin. It was always our hope that the public would embrace these bags and would find ways to incorporate them into their daily lives, and we're pleased to see Calgarians doing just that. In addition to introducing the compostable bags, we also continue to encourage our members to bring in or to purchase reusable shopping bags to carry their groceries or other purchases in, providing options for our members to take their groceries home.
By all accounts, our transition away from single-use plastics has been a resounding success and has been an example of how innovation can be used to solve some of our most pressing climate challenges, which is why we were shocked to learn that our bags were going to be included in the federal government ban, nationwide, even though they contain no plastics or microplastics. Even more bizarre is the fact that we would still be permitted to sell our compostable bags on shelves in bundles, but not individually at the till. To us, this makes no sense if the government's goal is, as they stated publicly, to eliminate single-use bags from the environment, regardless of their composition or characteristics.
Even after the federal ban took effect, our bags could still be sold to the consumer, who continued to use them in a multitude of ways. What's more, other single-use plastic bags, bin catchers and compostable bags on the market will also remain on store shelves, failing to address the problem that the federal government is claiming it wants to resolve, which is to get rid of plastics.
It is true that not all compostable bags are created equal. Some do contain microplastics and fail to break down quickly in the natural environment, but the solution should not be to issue a blanket ban on all compostables. Instead, we've offered to work with the various levels of government to create a set of universal standards for the composition and the labelling of compostable bags to ensure that only those that meet the most stringent of criteria would be allowed to be in circulation.
This would offer Canadians a choice when it comes to how they reduce their reliance on single-use plastics beyond just the cloth-like reusable bags, which take a significant amount of energy to produce, and it would encourage continued innovation in this space. It defies logic to simply ban compostable options when there can and should be an important effort to eliminate single-use plastics.
Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault has said that his department will not consider providing Calgary Co-op with an exemption to the single-use plastics ban, nor will he work with us to create standards that would allow for the use of the compostable bag options. We view this position as both disappointing and short-sighted. We should be providing Canadians with as many alternatives to single-use plastics as possible, not limiting them to just one and banning all others.
It's only a matter of time before the playing field shifts again and further innovation will be required to keep up. Furthermore, what kind of message does this send to businesses across industry sectors when the government outright rejects new and innovative ideas meant to solve complex problems and improve the lives of Canadians and instead imposes a one-size-fits-all solution that fails to see the forest for the trees?