Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:41 on 2023-03-25 Permalink Reply  

• shawn 09:50 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  I wonder if this means Tim Hortons will finally consent to bring back ceramic mugs. They did away with them during the pandemic, and they will now only give you a coffee, even if you are dining in, in a disposable cup.

• DeWolf 11:04 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  At least in the many independent cafés, I’ve found Montreal has a pretty good culture of using ceramic cups. When I was in New York last fall, nearly everyone used disposable paper and plastic cups even if they were staying put. Mountains of trash everywhere.

  My biggest worry is that we’ll start seeing more and more heavy-duty plastic takeaway containers for things like food delivery. They are in theory reusable, but nobody has space to store all of that, so they’ll probably just get thrown away. Some restaurants are now using paper containers which are at least compostable.

• shawn 11:19 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  Oh yes indie cafés better… except for a while there Olimpico seemed to stop using glass for iced coffees, leading to an even greater mountain of trash at Waverly and Saint-Viateur.

• JaneyB 11:22 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  A nice step in the right direction. I’m still wishing for standardized containers for everything but that would require a different world – even Canada’s now-gone modest standardized stubby beer bottle policy got a ruling from NAFTA some years back as biased against imports.

  Here’s a chart with some photos of permissible cups etc: https://guichetguta.ca/en/packaging/cups-glasses-and-lids/

• shawn 11:25 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  BTW so restos can only use non-laminated paper cups, which makes them compostable and (if clean) recyclable, amirite?

• Kate 14:41 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  I don’t know. Part of me suspects this is environmental theatre – the kind of thing that would only be truly useful as part of a much bigger program of change. I don’t like to feel myself being cynical, but there it is.

• jeather 16:48 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  I don’t know about cups or anything, but paper shopping bags are much bigger than plastic, so you have 10x as many containers being shipped on the ocean, more local shipments because it isn’t like every random store has lots of excess capacity to store bags so they need more deliveries, etc. And all of this is — look we KNOW who pollutes, it’s a few dozen giant companies, not people using plastic knives.

• DeWolf 16:56 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  The plastic bag ban resulted in nearly everyone carrying around reusable bags. Even when paper bags are available, not many people use them. So it’s probably a net reduction even if the paper bags take up more space.

  I also imagine that paper bags are manufactured locally so there wouldn’t be any cross-ocean shipping of them.

• jeather 20:21 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  You would imagine incorrectly. It is not a net reduction wrt number of pallets and they are not manufactured locally.

• JP 20:49 on 2023-03-25 Permalink

  I don’t have evidence and don’t feel like trying to do a search right now, but I also think that some of this is environmental theatre….reusable bags and totes have become an industry unto their own. I wonder how much goes into making one resource-wise and how many times one has to be used to balance out environmentally speaking.

• shawn 09:07 on 2023-03-26 Permalink

  Being able to compost or recycle non-laminated paperware would be good. But if they’re adding more PFAS to the product to make up for the loss of the moisture-resistant laminate, that’s very bad.