by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Jacques Lalonde, a 45-year-old Montreal IT worker, says he was looking for something enviro-friendly to do when the idea came to him from the TV set.

“I was watching a Radio-Canada interview with [Lac St-Jean PQ MNA Stéphan Tremblay] a few weeks ago and he was talking about the problems of plastic bags,” he says. And that was it. “By 12:30 that night I was working on this Web site.”

The site, www.ecocontribution.com, is a work in progress, Lalonde says. For now, it’s essentially an online petition urging the provincial government to adopt a motion Tremblay presented before the summer recess to look into possible ways of decreasing our consumption of plastic bags, estimated at two billion a year. Worldwide, estimates top the one trillion mark—almost two million a minute. That’s a lot of plastic going into landfills, leaching into soil and water tables and into oceans. Marine life sometimes mistake the bags for food and wind up choking to death.

Lalonde is hoping he gets 30,000 signatures by the time the bill is presented again in October—a not-unrealistic goal, given the rate at which he’s been collecting them, almost exclusively through word of mouth and e-mail.

“On Monday [July 4], there were 1,200 signatures,” he says. “By Tuesday, 2,400, 3,700 on Wednesday and 5,100 on Thursday.” By the end of Friday, July 8, he was close to 7,000.

“At first, I had just sent it out to a few friends, and realized that I obviously needed more visibility,” he says. “I did some research on the Internet and found these organizations and companies in Quebec that were eco-friendly, involved in biology and companies downriver involved in eco-tourism. So I sent out about 2,000 e-mails.” The response has been fittingly positive. “It’s going very well,” he says.

Tremblay, the PQ’s 31-year-old official spokesman on environmental matters, believes both major parties in the National Assembly support his motion. “One of my objectives is to look into ways that bags can be used as compost,” he says. “Another is to improve Quebec’s rate of recuperating used materials. The target is 65 per cent, but we know we’re not meeting that now.”

Toronto’s successful composting program, he says, is one inspiration for reducing waste, although that city’s initiative is not without its problems either. “You have to open the plastic bags to get at the materials inside,” he says. “And the bags people use aren’t biodegradable.”

Despite some opposition from its domestic plastics industry, Taiwan introduced a set of stringent limits on plastic bags in 2001. Bags were no longer distributed free in supermarkets, and violators faced stiff fines (although the fines were recently reduced in the face of protest from small businesses). Since 2003, Taiwanese environmental authorities say use of plastic bags has dropped by 69 per cent. Bangladesh, Australia, Ireland, Singapore and South Korea also have restrictions on plastic bags.

Even if Tremblay’s motion is adopted by the National Assembly, he is keeping his perspective. “This is only one issue among many,” he says. “The bigger issue is our general use of plastics. I think Quebec should be a leader in this field.”