The City of Delta will be formulating its own ban on plastic bags.
A motion put forward by councillors Dylan Kruger and Jeannie Kanakos at the Aug. 9 council meeting, and to be discussed at the next meeting of council in September, would see city staff looking into the steps necessary to come up with a bylaw banning single-use plastics.
Various civic advisory committees and Delta’s business community would provide input.
The B.C. government recently announced municipalities throughout the province can now move more quickly to prevent plastics from polluting their communities.
Under new rules, local governments can institute bans on plastic bags and certain single-use plastics without provincial approval.
The province has amended a regulation under the Community Charter to allow local governments to ban single-use plastics, including plastic checkout bags, polystyrene foam containers and plastic utensils, which includes stir sticks.
Previously, municipalities required ministerial approval to implement a plastics ban.
More than 20 municipalities in B.C. are developing bylaws banning single-use plastics, the province notes.
Under the previous regulation, bylaws were approved for the municipalities of Esquimalt, Nanaimo, Richmond, Rossland, Saanich, Surrey, Tofino, Ucluelet and Victoria.
The City of Delta, however, had been waiting for the regulation to change before moving forward with a ban.
This change by the province is part of the CleanBC Plastics Action Plan.
The province also notes it is expanding the number of products to be recycled through residential recycling programs by adding milk and milk-alternative containers to the deposit-refund system effective February 2022, and more single-use items to the packaging part of the Recycling Regulation effective January 2023.
It is also piloting new projects to use reclaimed plastic waste in new manufacturing through the CleanBC Plastics Action Fund.