Of all the actions taken by the federal government in the name of protecting the environment, clamping down on compostable shopping bags has got to be the silliest.
There’s no denying single-use plastic bags were something of a scourge when they were still commonplace.
When not being used for their intended purpose, bags would often roam free in our environment as litter, blown around by the wind and get stuck in everything imaginable.
And wherever they’d end up, it would take an extremely long time for them to degrade.
It’s no surprise there’s been a sustained push for more than a decade to rid ourselves of this particular type of single-use plastic.
And in the case of one Calgary company, Leaf Environmental Products, its founder’s intense dislike of plastic shopping bags proved to be a catalyst for innovation.
“I started this company about seven years ago because I really, really hate single-use plastics and loathe their existence,” said Jerry Gao in an interview with Postmedia at the beginning of 2023.
Although Leaf makes a number of alternatives to single-use plastics, its biggest claim to fame is its compostable shopping bag, which is widely distributed by Calgary Co-op, among other retailers.
Not only can these bags be used to bring groceries home, but they can easily be given a second life as a liner for kitchen compost pails.
They’ve even been given the seal of approval by the city of Calgary, which operates a mechanical composting facility.
And if these bags do somehow escape into the wild, they are designed to break down more easily than their plastic cousins.
Still, this has proved not good enough for the federal government and its bureaucrats, which still consider them single-use plastic bags — even though there’s not a single gram of actual plastic in them.
By the end of this year, Co-op and other retailers won’t be allowed to sell these bags at the checkout.
Although the federal government recently lost a court battle over its single-use plastics ban, namely for having classified all plastics as toxic, an appeal is underway.
With this legal uncertainty, Co-op said it will “fully comply with the legislation until a final decision is reached.”
“We will continue to seek an exemption from the federal government,” Co-op wrote last week in a message to its members.
So does this mean you won’t be able to get your hands on these bags?
As it turns out, it doesn’t.
Starting Dec. 20, Co-op will be bundling these bags into packages of five or 10 and selling them on store shelves, rather than having them handy at their checkout counters.
What’s the difference between selling these bags at the front of the store versus selling them at the back?
There isn’t one.
Nothing stops a customer from buying a bundle of these bags from the housekeeping section of the supermarket and cracking it open at the checkout to use right away.
Meanwhile, stores also sell compost bin liners that aren’t made to be used as shopping bags — a truly single-use product.
If this doesn’t demonstrate the federal edict’s utter pointlessness, then I don’t know what will.
The problems with single-use shopping bags are real and as much as I was among those who used to find creative ways to reuse these bags, I understand the need to replace them with a better alternative.
The federal government should be rewarding companies like Leaf and Calgary Co-op for their ingenuity in offering a shopping bag that can also double as an encouragement for people to do more sorting of their home refuse, making full use of municipal organics collection programs.
Instead, the federal bureaucracy would rather follow the rules to the letter by banning these bags, even if the result is unhelpful and perverse.
It’s as if Ottawa has no idea what it’s doing.
rleong@postmedia.com
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