Canadian businesses already dealing with inflation, labour shortages and tariff uncertainties now face a new challenge courtesy of their own federal government: the (FPR). Manufacturers are probably using a different F-word than “federal” to describe it.
The registry is part of Ottawa’s push to monitor and eventually reduce plastic waste by collecting detailed data from companies that make, use or dispose of plastics.
Ottawa didn’t need new legislation to impose this. On Dec. 30, 2023, the federal government issued a notice of intent to create the registry under the 1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act. A final notice followed on April 20, 2024.
According to the FPR website, companies — including resin manufacturers, plastic producers and service providers — must report annually to Environment Canada. Required disclosures include the quantity and types of plastics they manufacture, import and place on the market. They must also report how much plastic is collected and diverted, reused, repaired, remanufactured, refurbished, recycled, turned into chemicals, composted, incinerated or sent to landfill.
It ties into Canada’s larger Zero Plastic Waste agenda, a strategy to eliminate plastic waste by 2030.
Even more troubling is the breadth of plastic that will eventually be affected. While Phase 1 already includes packaging, electronic and electrical equipment, and single-use items headed for residential waste streams, future phases are expected to expand the scope further, to include tires, vehicles, construction materials, agricultural and fishing gear, textiles, carpets and more.
In practice, this means that even businesses whose core products aren’t plastic — like farmers, retailers or construction firms — could be swept into the reporting requirements. And while companies that handle less than 1,000 kg of plastics per year are currently exempt, the net will still capture a wide swath of Canadian industry.
Plastics are in nearly everything, and now businesses must report everything about them, regardless of whether plastic is central to their business or incidental.
The FPR website says the goal is to collect “meaningful and standardized data, from across the country, on the flow of plastic from production to its end-of-life management.” That information will “inform and measure performance… of various measures that are part of Canada’s zero plastic waste agenda.” Its stated purpose is to “keep plastics in the economy and out of the environment.”
But here’s the problem: the government’s zero plastic waste goal is an illusion. It would require every plastic item to last forever or never exist in the first place, leaving businesses with an impossible task: stay profitable while meeting these demands.
To help navigate the maze, international consultancy Reclay StewardEdge recently held a webinar for Canadian companies. The discussion was revealing.
Reclay lead consultant Maanik Bagai said the FPR is without precedent. “It really surpasses whatever we have seen so far across the world. I would say it is unprecedented in nature. And obviously this is really going to be tricky,” he said.
Mike Cuma, Reclay’s senior manager of marketing and communications, added that the government’s online compliance instructions aren’t particularly helpful.
“There’s a really, really long list of kind of how to do it. It’s not particularly user-friendly in our experience,” Cuma said. “If you still have questions, if it still seems confusing, perhaps complex, we agree with you. That’s normal, I think, at this point — even just on the basic stuff of what needs to be reported, where, when, why. Don’t worry, you’re not alone in that feeling at all.”
The first reporting deadline, for 2024 data, is Sept. 29, 2025. Cuma warned that businesses should “start now” — and some “should maybe have started a couple months ago.”
Whether companies manage this in-house or outsource to consultants, they will incur significant costs in both time and money. September marks the first phase of four, with each future stage becoming more extensive and restrictive.
Plastics are petroleum products — and like oil and gas, they’re being demonized. The FPR looks less like environmental stewardship and more like an attempt to regulate and monitor a vast swath of the economy.
A worse possibility? That it’s a test run for a broader agenda — top-down oversight of every product from cradle to grave.
While seemingly unrelated, both the FPR and other global initiatives reflect a growing trend toward comprehensive monitoring of products from creation to disposal.
This isn’t speculation. A May 2021 on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website spotlighted a New York-based start-up, Eon, which created a platform to track fashion items through their life cycles. Called Connected Products, the platform gives each fashion item a digital birth certificate detailing when and where it was made, and from what. It then links to a digital twin and a digital passport that follows the product through use, reuse and disposal.
The goal, according to WEF, is to reduce textile waste and production, and thereby cut water usage. But the underlying principle — surveillance in the name of sustainability — has a much broader application.
Free markets and free people built prosperity. But some elites won’t leave us alone. They envision a future where everything is tracked, regulated and justified by the supposed need to “save the planet.”
So what if plastic eventually returns to the earth it came from? Its disposability is its virtue. And while we’re at it, let’s bury the Federal Plastics Registry and its misguided mandates with it. Permanently.
Lee Harding is a research associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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