The meeting ended with no concrete decisions for collaboration or consultation between the WDO and the ENGO representatives in the future. Yet the process of developing the MOU and the plan itself has lacked mechanisms of meaningful consultation with ENGOs and the public at large. Comprehensive consultation is absolutely necessary to the success of such a funding plan. The funding plan will not achieve waste reduction without a complementary regulatory framework that enforces overall waste reduction by providing incentives to industry to change their current packaging and product design practices. Specifically, recycled content and returnable packaging legislation is necessary.
Collective incentives are inherently flawed.
If the WDO desires to implement incentives that will cause behavioral change on the product producer's side, as representatives expressed at the meeting, then this must be explicitly stated in the WDO's Guiding Principles. The WDO's current mechanism for measuring the diversion of waste does not embody the full idea of overall waste reduction, and under this mechanism, the WDO's plan will not come close to achieving the original targets set by the Province of Ontario in 1986. The funding-based incentives detailed in the WDO Backgrounder for municipalities are largely inappropriate. The industry members of the WDO, as the creators of the packaging that ends up in the waste stream, should put the priority on focusing on their own inefficiencies. The proposed considerations for remote communities do not give due acknowledgement of the unique situation of northern communities.