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These warnings are useful, and doubtless mollify Deloitte’s lawyers, but then the report jumps in with both feet. Its second chapter is titled “Canada throws away 87 per cent of plastics, valued at CA$7.8 billion.” This supposedly creates a “CA$7.8 billion lost opportunity.”

No, it doesn’t! The way the report gets to $7.8 billion is to start with the value of new plastic resin entering the Canadian economy each year, which is $9 billion, and then taking 87 per cent of that, since 86 per cent of plastics end up as landfill every year while one per cent leaks into the environment (where an unfortunate whale might eat it).

If you’re prone to count costs as benefits, then expensively poring through our garbage to find the occasional nugget may make sense

But that’s like saying the retail value of restaurant food thrown out every year is $x billion — because had it been sold, its menu price amounts to that — and therefore the restaurant food thrown out in Canada creates an opportunity of $x billion a year. But thrown-out food is different from food that hasn’t been thrown out. It has a much lower value. Maybe not zero. But to make use of it you’ve got to spend resources recovering it, making it presentable and edible again, and delivering it — quickly — to a new potential eater. Doing all that eats into your $x billion “opportunity.” In most real-world cases, it eats so far into it as to consume it entirely. Which is why restaurants recycle so little food, however much this offends moralists.

The same with plastics: Thrown-out plastics do not have the same value as new plastics. To begin with, they’re used. And they may be embedded in other products — cars, for instance, which the Deloitte report says are 100-per-cent recovered (i.e., not thrown into landfills) but only for their metals, not for their much lower-valued plastics. “It is … more cost-effective and less labour-intensive to crush and shred vehicles or appliances for metal recycling than to dismantle parts, including plastic parts.” Plus: plastics in cars are “potentially contaminated by automotive fluids.” Triage or decontamination are simply too costly.