Agricultural plastics management engagement

Aug 12, 2025

We are gathering insights and perspectives about how a regulatory approach could be applied to managing agricultural plastics waste.

Agricultural plastics, such as baler twine, grain bags, bale wrap, and silage plastic, can cause waste challenges for agricultural producers and agricultural businesses and leave lasting environmental impacts. Currently, recycling options for agricultural plastics are limited to certain materials and rely on voluntary approaches or pilot programs.

Shifting to a regulatory approach would provide long-term certainty for material management, a level playing field for agricultural plastics producers, and economies of scale to better support processing facilities. It would also encourage agricultural plastics producers to develop innovative waste management solutions.

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In Alberta, there are currently 2 regulatory approaches for the end-of-life management of waste materials that can be recycled. The approaches are typically referred to as extended producer responsibility (EPR) and stewardship. Either of these approaches could be considered to manage agricultural plastics waste or another regulatory approach could be developed.

Under EPR, material producers are responsible for operating and funding a system to collect, process and recycle the materials they supply into Alberta. The Extended Producer Responsibility Regulation, which came into force in November 2022, provides the framework for EPR systems. Currently, single-use products, packaging and paper, as well as hazardous and special products are included in the regulation.

Alberta also regulates end-of-life management of waste materials through regulated stewardship programs. Currently, there are 4 regulated stewardship programs managed by the Alberta Recycling Management Authority (electronics, paint and paint containers, tires and used oil materials) and one managed by the Beverage Container Management Board (beverage containers).

Under a stewardship program, material producers are responsible for funding but not managing a system to collect, process and recycle the materials they supply.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids