A Kamloops councillor hopes single-use plastics will be banned in the city sometime next year.

Dale Bass first proposed the ban in March of 2019, and staff created a draft bylaw. But Bass says pandemic has slowed down progress.

She says this topic is probably front and centre now for many more people as a result of the pandemic.

“I anticipate that they might also have realized with all the takeout food that came with plastic, they might’ve realized there’s an awful lot of plastics going out into the city as well. I’m just hoping that may have had an impact, and may have led people to understand that we can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep using a plastic fork and throwing it in the garbage to sit in a landfill for several hundred years.”

Council’s development and sustainability committee was informed Monday city staff will await word from higher levels of government on how to proceed with a ban on plastics.

“There’s no sense in us trying to do something, because we have to have a bylaw on it, and then maybe whatever we decide to do is not what we’re supposed to do, and then we have to go through the whole process of passing another bylaw,” Bass says. So it’s more expedient and less time-consuming for staff, if we just wait and do it the way we’re supposed to do it, when we’re told how to do it.”

Victoria city council had brought in a plastic bag ban in 2018, but it was later challenged by the Canadian Plastic Bag Association and then determined by the BC Supreme Court that Victoria had overstepped its authority. An appeal case by Victoria failed in January of 2020.