Plan For The Ban: Proposed Amendments Scrapping Export Ban For Single-Use Plastics Published

On October 20, 2025, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada ("ECCC") announced on X that the Federal Government will no longer be pursuing the single-use plastics export ban under the Single-use Plastics Prohibition Regulations (the "SUP Regulations"). We discussed the announcement and its implications, as well as SUP Regulations more generally in our previous bulletin, here. On December 20, 2025, ECCC followed through on their tweet and published the proposed Amendments to the Single-use Plastics Prohibition Regulations (the "Proposed Amendments").

This bulletin is part of our ongoing Plan for the Ban series covering all manner of plastics regulation in Canada.

The Proposed Amendments

The text of the Proposed Amendments reads:

2(2) Subject to sections 8 and 9, these Regulations do not apply in respect of plastic manufactured items referred to in section 1 that are manufactured, imported or sold for the purpose of export.

The Proposed Amendments would allow the manufacture, import and sale for the purpose of export for the six categories of single-use plastics covered by the SUP Regulations, namely checkout bags, cutlery, foodservice ware made from or containing problematic plastics, ring carriers, stir sticks and straws. Importantly, the Proposed Amendments will not change the record-keeping requirements set out in sections 8 and 9 of the SUP Regulations, which require any manufacturer, importer or seller of any of the obligated products to keep a record proving the products' export for a period of five years. The records must be available for retrieval upon request from the Department of the Environment.

Reasoning Behind the Proposed Amendments

ECCC has stated that the Proposed Amendments are intended to prevent job loss in the Canadian manufacturing sector and to preserve important facility investments that have already been made by Canadian companies. Acknowledging also that the economic cost of the export ban is likely higher than any environmental objectives that the ban would fulfil, in part a result of other countries opting not to introduce similar bans, the ECCC argues that the export prohibition is not required to ensure the overall efficacy of the SUP Regulations to reduce the generation of plastic waste from single-use plastics.