Single-use plastics are often lightweight and inexpensive to produce, but their disposal creates substantial costs for waste management systems, wastewater treatment facilities, litter cleanup efforts, and ecosystems. Despite growing concern about plastic pollution, limited data exists on the quantities and costs associated with specific single-use plastic products in Canada. 

This report examines eight commonly used single-use plastic items and estimates their economic impacts across waste management pathways and ecosystem goods and services. The analysis draws on municipal waste data, wastewater sector input, citizen science litter data sets, and ecosystem impact research to provide a comprehensive assessment of the costs associated with plastic pollution. 

The report also presents a practical tool for municipalities and other authorities to estimate and track plastic waste management costs, supporting evidence-based decision making and policy development.

Across the Canadian Prairies, water carries memory, identity, responsibility, and life. Yet the voices of those most deeply connected to it are often absent from climate and water policy discussions. 

Through Stories of Resilience: Water, the Natural Infrastructure for Water Solutions (NIWS) initiative and The Resilience Institute (TRI) are helping change that. This digital story map brings forward the experiences of Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people from across Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba—sharing deeply personal reflections on water, climate change, stewardship, and resilience. 

The stories reveal water as far more than infrastructure or a resource to manage. Participants speak of rivers as lifelines, lakes as relatives, and water as a living being that connects families, cultures, and generations. They also describe the growing pressures facing Prairie communities, from drought and wildfire to ecosystem loss and changing watersheds, while highlighting community-led responses rooted in Indigenous knowledge, restoration, and care for the land. 

For the International Institute for Sustainable Development, this work is part of a broader effort to support more inclusive and resilient water futures across the Prairies. By elevating voices too often overlooked in environmental decision making, Stories of Resilience: Water challenges us to rethink our relationship with water—and with each other. 

Like tributaries flowing into a larger watershed, each story contributes to a growing collective understanding of what resilience can look like in a changing climate.

Significant infrastructure deficits in municipalities across North America indicate that infrastructure is being expanded at an unsustainable rate. At the same time, governments are faced with the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

This report examines how urban development patterns influence both the fiscal and environmental costs of car-oriented infrastructure. Low-density growth patterns often generate insufficient tax revenue to cover their full life-cycle infrastructure costs, contributing to long-term municipal liabilities, while also reinforcing car dependency and higher emissions. The research explores how fiscal impact analysis, infrastructure planning, and land-use policy can be better integrated to support more financially and environmentally sustainable development outcomes.

Subject: Canadian climate policy and the Alberta memorandum of understanding 

Dear Prime Minister Carney, 

Your first year in government has been defined by a series of world-altering events which have had obvious implications for Canada’s national unity, security, sovereignty, and economic stability. We understand that proactively managing these issues has, with good reason, been the primary objective of your government for the last twelve months. 

Nevertheless, a year into your mandate, it is more important than ever that you begin to deliver meaningful action on policies that will scale domestic clean energy solutions, reduce emissions, and set Canada up for economic success in a rapidly decarbonizing world. 

The ongoing situation in Iran is only making this more urgent. Just as we saw with Europe’s response to the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022, oil supply shocks play out differently now than they did in the past. In the short term, governments have rapidly recalibrated where they are purchasing oil and gas from, as they rush to keep their economies functioning. However, now more than ever, we are seeing governments simultaneously expedite their plans to scale up clean energy solutions – such as building wind and solar energy projects, or shifting as much transportation as possible to electric vehicles – in order to shield their populations from future oil and gas supply shocks. In other words, those in Canada who continue to argue that the war presents an opportunity to expand Canada’s oil and gas exports, including to new Asian markets, are making a consequential miscalculation. 

While countries across Asia and Europe engage in short-term energy rationing and longer-term restructuring of their economies away from oil and gas dependence and towards domestically produced clean electricity, here in Canada, we are stuck in an unhelpful feedback loop of discourse about the need for more oil and gas infrastructure and the loosening of environmental regulations on multi-billion dollar oil and gas companies. Nowhere is this more evident than in the delay to the promised resolution of the Alberta-federal Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on energy and climate policies. 

We are increasingly concerned that your voluntary deadline of April 1 came and went without an agreement, and that several critical issues remain unresolved.

• Industrial carbon pricing: This is the most important element of the MOU. Reaching a minimum effective TIER credit price of $130 — a commitment that we emphasize both | 2 governments already signed onto in the original MOU text — is crucial. This must be achieved in short order; we suggest by 2030. Doing so will unlock a high-growth, low-carbon economy across Western Canada. According to analysis of publicly available information on potential projects, tens of billions of dollars in industrial investment is currently held up by the lack of resolution on this question.
• Clean electricity: Alberta, along with the rest of Canada, is facing steep increases in electricity demand in the coming years. Grid planners and provincial governments must make serious, credible plans to grow their electricity supply in a way that is cost-effective and ensures long-term reliability and energy security while lowering emissions. There is no realistic pathway to this outcome in Alberta that does not include the widespread deployment of wind and solar, much more than is possible under current market reforms and provincial red tape. This is true even if Alberta continues to explore other, much more expensive and slower-to-deploy options, such as nuclear or gas-with-CCS. The Clean Electricity Regulations were designed to ensure new investments are not locking in higher-emitting technology. Alberta needs to commit to a policy suite that achieves an equivalent pathway to 2050 by removing current barriers to renewable energy investment in addition to setting an effective industrial carbon price.
• Methane: We saw positive signals in your March 25 agreement-in-principle with Alberta, particularly the use of third-party modeling and emissions verification. However, the actual methane regulations subsequently published by Alberta on March 27 clearly do not deliver emissions reductions equivalent to current federal regulations, and so cannot be the basis for the “outcomes-based equivalency agreement” described in the agreement-in-principle and the MOU. 

On September 10, in Edmonton, you told your national caucus that Canada’s response to climate change is “not just a moral duty, but an economic imperative.” 

This is true, and your handling of the negotiations with Alberta is your most consequential opportunity to turn those words into real action. This is what effective industrial carbon pricing, good faith efforts to grow clean electricity, and ambitious methane regulations can do — but neither the climate nor investment will wait indefinitely for Canada and Alberta to come to the table. 

In your second year as prime minister, we trust that you will do more to actively facilitate the prosperous, climate-safe future that all Canadians deserve. We remain committed to helping your government, and all governments, find policy solutions to do so. 

Yours sincerely,

Chris Severson-Baker, Executive Director, Pembina Institute 

Rachel Doran, Executive Director, Clean Energy Canada 

Tim Gray, Executive Director, Environmental Defence 

Daniel Rotman, Directeur général, Équiterre

Patricia Fuller, President and CEO, IISD

Caroline Brouillette, Executive Director | Directrice éxécutive, Climate Action Network - Réseau action climat Canada