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By Sheldon Spackman

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Red Deer not considering ban on plastic bags at this time

Jan 31, 2020 | 11:07 AM

As grocery store chains and municipalities across Canada move to ban plastic bags or single-use plastics, the City of Red Deer has no such plans at this time.

Nancy Hackett, environmental initiatives supervisor for the city says more of an educational approach has been taken in our community so far.

“There are no plans in the works to create a bylaw or a ban, but really working on that educational effort and really recognizing that it is driven by consumers in a lot of ways and by merchants and retailors,” she explains.

“We have partnered in the past with organizations such as Hearts of Women on educational campaigns and giving out re-useable bags at Let’s Talk each year. We have re-useable shopping bags that we provide to folks who stop by the City booths, and then our Green Deer campaign each year educates about all kinds of litter and all kinds of waste and especially with the plastic bags since they often wind up as litter blowing in our parks or along our river.”

Hackett says Red Deer is watching closely the town of Devon, which passed a bylaw six months ago banning the distribution of plastic bags at all retail locations starting Jan. 1 of this year, to see how that goes.

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“We are also watching some local businesses that are moving that way,” says Hackett. “Sobeys chain has announced nation-wide that they’re going to be eliminating the sale of plastic bags, so they’re really showing leadership there. We’re very interested and watching and seeing how that plays-out in our community.”

Wetaskiwin passed a ban on plastic bags last July, while the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo updated its 2010 plastic bag ban bylaw in 2012.

In Red Deer, Hackett says the most recent figures available from 2007 show about 5.6 per cent of the city’s residential waste was made up of plastic film such as bags, wrap and frozen food bags – noting plastic bags are not recyclable in Red Deer, but landfilled along with other waste.

“Any single-use plastic can wind up in the landfill and we have goals in our community to reduce waste,” she explains. “We want to extend the life of that landfill. It costs us money to fill up the landfill and it has environmental impacts, and so any place that we can reduce waste, that’s the first “R” in Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, we really want to reduce by reusing re-useable bags when we shop.”

More information on the City’s environmental initiatives can be found in the 2019 Environmental Master Plan.