The world is struggling with plastic pollution — Canada is no exception

As thousands of delegates meet in Ottawa this week to work toward a global treaty on curbing plastic waste, the experts say the world may never get a better opportunity to confront the problem.

In a series of interviews with CBC's The House airing Saturday, participants at this week's United Nations conference said the problem of plastic waste goes far beyond questions about whether a particular item can go in the blue bin, or what happened to plastic straws.

The Ottawa negotiations are the second-to-last meeting before 176 countries are expected to finalize a treaty to tackle plastic waste by addressing plastics throughout their lifecycle, from production to use and disposal.

"Ottawa really needs to be a turning point," Graham Forbes, the global plastics project leader at Greenpeace, told CBC News ahead of the meetings. "We're in a make-or-break moment for the global plastics treaty negotiations."

One expert told The House host Catherine Cullen this week that the treaty needs to address aspects of waste disposal even more basic than questions about international plastic standards and recycling.

"Well, the reality is that 67 per cent of the global population do not have access to waste collection services," said Clarissa Morawski, CEO of Reloop Platform, an anti-waste advocacy group.

"And that's the fundamental reason why we have a plastics pollution problem. So the first thing we need to do is get everybody around the world up to that 95 per cent coverage level."

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault told CBC's Power & Politics this week that the international approach would allow the global community to meet ambitious targets, including the goal of ending plastic pollution by 2040 agreed to by a group of countries known as the High Ambition Coalition.

"Right now it's a handful of countries that are doing things like bans of single-use plastics. But when it's 100 countries, 150 countries, almost 200 countries, then it is going to be much easier to do that," Guilbeault said.

Domestically, debate continues over the best way to address plastic waste in Canada.

The federal government recently announced a registry to track the kinds of plastic that are produced in Canada. It's part of an effort to create a national standard to replace provincial tracking programs that Environment Canada says are not consistent across jurisdictions.

The registry is part of the federal government's overall effort to reduce plastic waste in Canada. Canadians throw away more than four million tonnes of plastic waste every year, according to Ottawa. Only nine per cent is recycled, with the bulk ending up in landfills.

A Federal Court judge also ruled last year that Canada's decision to list plastics as toxic, a step that helped lead to a ban on some single-use plastics, was unconstitutional. Ottawa is appealing the ruling.

That ruling has been stayed, meaning the anti-single-use plastic regulations are still in effect. But the Conservatives are pushing legislation that would bring back plastic straws, spurred by new research showing that some compostable items are made with what are known as "forever chemicals," potentially harmful substances.