Letter to Toronto City Council

RE: The Plastic Bag Fee

Toronto City Council votes in June on whether or not to scrap the city's plastic bag fee. Please feel free to use the letter below as a template for contacting your city council representative to encourage them to vote NO to scrapping the bag fee.

Dear [insert councillor's name],

I am extremely disappointed by the results of last week's vote by the city council executive committee to rescind the plastic bag fee in Toronto. I believe that the plastic bag fee has proven its ability to decrease the use of plastic bags (a reduction of more than 50% in less than 3 years!) and has encouraged businesses to provide alternatives to single-use plastic bags. You may not be aware, but an average plastic grocery bag is used for less than ten minutes before being discarded and takes between 100-1000 years to break down. Plastics, such as polyethylene (which is what most single-use bags are made from), will not biodegrade. Instead, they photo-degrade - essentially breaking down into smaller pieces.

The process of mass-producing, recycling, and incinerating plastic bags relies heavily on non-renewable resources (including petroleum and natural gas), releases a large amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (approximately 6kgs of CO2 per 1kg of polyethylene), and is detrimental to the environment. I am extremely concerned with the environmental repercussions posed from single-use plastic bags and as my representative in Ward [insert #], I ask you to please defend the plastic bag fee (as well as motions to revamp it) and share the benefits of this by-law at the next city council meeting.

Thank-you,

[insert name]

For a list of councillors' email addresses, click here.

For Mayor Rob Ford's contact info, click here.

I'll be keeping you up to date on Toronto's plastic bag fee, so stay tuned!

And be sure to follow on Twitter @PPSProject for additional

content and updates!

Thanks for reading!