The Supreme Court of Canada says it will hear an appeal of Ottawa’s single-use plastics ban.
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The Supreme Court of Canada says it will hear an appeal of Ottawa’s ban on single-use plastics.
In 2022, Ottawa phased in a ban on the manufacturing and sale of six single-use plastic items, including straws, stir sticks, cutlery, takeout containers and the six-pack rings used to hold soda and beer cans.
According to the government at the time, those items were chosen because they were commonly found in litter and had known and accessible alternatives.
To implement the ban, the federal government listed “plastic manufactured items” as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, based on a scientific assessment.
In 2023, the Federal Court said the listing was too broad, in part because the federal government had not shown that all plastic items harm human health or the environment.
In January, the Federal Court of Appeal overturned that decision, allowing the federal government to keep the ban in place.
The three-judge panel said the lower court erred by treating the matter as a single step, when it described it as a two-step process: designating plastics as toxic under the Act and regulating individual plastic items.
The appeal was brought after an initial challenge by a group representing companies in Canada’s plastics industry, along with three chemical companies that manufacture plastics.
The plastics industry argued, among other things, that a lack of testing to determine which plastics are harmful made Ottawa’s decision unreasonable.
In dismissing that argument in January, the court said, “the chemical content of (plastics) is irrelevant to the sea otter choking on a plastic straw. The problem is the plastic item itself, not its chemistry,” according to the judges’ written reasons.
The report was published Oct. 15, 2026.
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