Canada’s plastic ban has a big hole in it. What about groceries?

If you look closely at the aisles of your supermarket and look at the packaging instead of the fruit and vegetables, you can see how much plastic is used.

Sliced ​​mushrooms displayed on polystyrene foam trays – a plastic now banned for use in take-out – and wrapped in plastic wrap, which will soon no longer be collected in the blue box.

Peppers packed in clear plastic packaging so you pay less when you buy several.

“What they’re doing now is just completely unsustainable from a waste and plastic standpoint,” said Karen Wirsig, plastics program manager for Canada’s Environmental Defense organization.

“If we want to avoid food waste, it’s a terrible idea to pack things up and force me to buy ten when I only need five.”

Environmental Defense conducted an audit of 54 supermarkets across Canada – both large supermarket chains and independent companies – and found that 64 percent of items in the produce, baby food, pet food and soup courses were packaged in plastic. The group released its findings in April.

“The growth of this type of packaging goes against the government’s goal of eliminating plastic waste by 2030,” the Environmental Defense report said. “The increase in the use of all types of plastic packaging also raises concerns about the exposure of humans – and especially infants and toddlers – to chemical additives commonly found in plastic packaging, including phthalates and bisphenols.”

The federal government has banned some hard-to-recycle plastics used for takeout containers, as well as some other single-use plastics, such as straws and ring carriers, as part of its goal to reach zero plastic waste by 2030. ban on single-use plastic bags, there are no restrictions in supermarkets.

The government says it is “looking at how best to manage the use of excess or unnecessary plastic packaging in supermarkets and will publish a discussion paper for public comment in the coming weeks,” according to an email from Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Canadians throw away three million tons — that’s three billion kilograms — of plastic waste every year, less than 10 percent of which is recycled, according to ECCC.

Wirsig, who sits on a federal advisory committee examining how to reduce plastic waste and pollution, says the government is considering a mandate of 50 percent recycled content in plastic packaging, but may exempt food packaging because “it’s very hard to get food” . high-quality recycled plastic.”

Plastic in general can be difficult to recycle for a number of reasons.

Household plastic waste is often contaminated by food, depreciating it in value because of the sorting that would be required to remove the contaminated items. Plastic packaging can contain multiple layers of material, making it difficult to separate for recycling. Canada lacks the physical infrastructure to scale up recycling. And environmentalists say recycling plastics releases more chemicals and microplastics into the environment.

Milieudefensie has insisted on reusable systems.

“Probably the most successful long-term reuse and refill program that has never gone away is beer bottles,” says Wirsig, referring to the deposit-return program in Ontario’s beer stores. “How can we adapt that to other things that are in jars? Or even cans with resealable lids.”

One company trying to help producers reuse their packaging in supermarkets is Circulr, which offers a deposit return system on glass jars used by more than 20 brands.

Consumers who return the jars to one of the company’s collection locations in Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph or Cambridge can request a refund of a minimal deposit through an app. The company cleans the jars and sends them back to the same producers where possible so they can reuse them.

Circulr has partnered with a number of stores and brands, but has yet to scale the program to place aggregators in one of Ontario’s major supermarket chains, something the company’s co-founder Charles Binks-Collier hopes to do this year.

Wirsig says supermarkets can play an important role in reducing plastic packaging.

“They determine a lot of the packaging decisions. And they can also drive that change,’ she says. “They should definitely start with their own brands… But I think they should also put pressure” on other brands, she says.

“Loblaws recently had a falling out with Frito-Lay,” she says, pointing to a pricing dispute between the supermarket chain and the snack maker, which resulted in a shortage of the snack maker’s goods on shelves for more than a month.

“You could argue about packaging.”

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