Nearly half the plastic waste produced in Canada comes from packaging.

Now that’s something to think about over the holidays as we try to shove all that excess packaging into overflowing recycling boxes and garbage bins.

All that waste and it isn’t even from the things we need and want, which, of course, don’t last anywhere near as long as things (whatever things they happen to be) used to. No, it’s from the stuff wrapped around the things we need and want.

Who hasn’t found themselves wondering why everything from electronics to vegetables needs so much packaging? Or why a child’s toy needs to be wrapped in plastic, affixed to cardboard with plastic ties, and boxed up with yet more cardboard and plastic?

Only a small portion of that plastic packaging ever gets recycled into something new. The rest is bound for garbage landfills and incinerators and, more depressing still, our waterways and oceans where it turns into floating islands of debris.

And about that bin-stuffing exercise, let’s do try to get things in the right bin, especially in Toronto where it turns out we’re missing the target far too often.

A 2019 audit of Toronto’s blue bin recycling program found an average contamination rate of 30 per cent.

That’s a lot of garbage and non-recyclable materials being thrown into those blue bins.

Some of this is aspirational recycling, or “wishcycling.” People think that an item should be recycled so they throw it in hoping they’re right, and if they’re wrong someone at the processing facility will simply take it out.

There are also plenty of honest mistakes. Non-recyclable materials can look awfully similar to recyclable materials. The difference between two plastic take-out containers can be hard to spot. And a container’s recyclability can, in fact, depend entirely on what sorting technology or recycling contracts a given municipality has in place.

And, of course, some of this is laziness or simply taking the easy way out since many residential recycling bins are larger than the garbage bins.

In the end, whatever the motivation, it all amounts to contamination. And it comes with significant costs to the city and its taxpayers.

The cost of recycling contracts rises dramatically when the contamination rates exceed 27 per cent. So in 2019, Toronto had to pay an additional $5 million because of all that contamination.

That’s a pretty poor way to spend $5 million, especially in a city that has far greater needs than its revenue can cover.

In the short run we should all strive for more informed and less wishcycling habits.

But in the longer term — and really the sooner the better — we need less packaging in the first place. And what packaging there is needs to be a lot easier to recycle.

That’s the great hope behind government moves to make producers financially responsible for the end-life of their products. Perhaps their own bottom line will finally incent them to reduce unnecessary packaging, innovate and opt for materials that are easier to recycle.

Ontario is moving to have industry take over the operation and entire cost of running municipal blue box systems, from the 50 per cent share they now pay, starting in 2023.

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And earlier this year, the federal government said it will ban “harmful single-use plastics,” including disposable straws, cutlery and shopping bags, as early as 2021.

But while we wait for governments to force business to be better, we need to be better at our part. So, no, that fancy foil wrapping and ribbons do not go in the recycling bin. Neither does laminated plastic film or bubble wrap.

Let’s at least strive this holiday season to shove all that stuff into the right bin.