 I'm Sheila Wilder and I'm Associate Director of the Health Justice Institute, the Dalhousie Health Justice Institute. We're grateful to convene today's lecture and this year's lecture series in Wignagi, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Wignagi people. We pay respect to the indigenous knowledge, health by the Wignagi people and the wisdom of their elders past and present. We also recognize that African Nova Scotians are distinct people with histories, legacies and contributions. I've enriched that part of the Wignagi known as Nova Scotia for over 400 years. This is the first lecture in this year's Dalhousie Health Justice Institute seminar series and yes we've officially changed our name from Health Law to Health Justice Institute and bear with me, that's meant to mark at least two things. One is that law is both a potential tool of health justice and of injustice, of inequitable health outcomes reflecting the deep and systematic inequalities of colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and ableism. As a collective we at the Dalhousie Health Justice Institute are interested in convening conversations that reach into and through and beyond law to conversations about justice and we mark that as our name change. And two, second point, our change name which de-centers law convenes our interdisciplinarity. So the Health Justice Institute brings the faculties of health, medicine, dentistry and law together with representatives of other disciplines and with students, policymakers and the diverse publics we serve to engage an array of perspectives on and methods of exploring the meaning and determinants of health and health justice. I just want to point out a couple of people beyond myself as we start up the series for this year and before turning to introducing Dr. Sack. So first an invisible person, just invisible for the moment, our institute's director, Matthew Kerter. He gives us regrets today and wanted me to welcome you all on his behalf. I also want to recognize the critical role in this series of the institute's administrative coordinator, Ashley Johnson. There she is in the back. Great round of applause. Thank you so much. Thank you so much to make these seminar lectures happen. And last, I also want to recognize, I think maybe any visible person at this moment that's so present for us, our wonderful new dean of the law school, Sarah Kirby. Just a couple more words to introduce the series as a whole before turning to our much anticipated speaker for today. This is the 26th year and the 201st lecture in this seminar series. So once again, we offer eight lectures to the end of March. And this year we're framing our lectures around the deceptively straightforward question, what is health justice? Today's lecture by Professor Sarah Sack provides a critical foundation for this year's series as we explore that question. So I cast my mind back to almost exactly one year ago when I faced the hard task of introducing this seminar series, just a few days after the death of our long-time law school colleague and friend, environmental law scholar, Myne Hartdwell, taken from us in untimely fashion in a road accident while riding this bike. I found myself marking the tragic end to Myne Hart's life and life's work on a day that, just like today, was marked as a day of international climate action, a global strike for climate reparations and justice. I said a year ago that the personal tragedy that we were all so raw and still absorbing was amplified and given new force by our convening on that day of action. I committed us as an institute and as members of a common humanity to do more to consider the deep relationship between health and the environment and to respond to the enormous, inequitable global suffering that the resource extraction and consumption brought by us in the global north have unleashed in the form of climate change. I committed on behalf of the institute, now the Health Justice Institute, to do better in making connections between health justice and environmental justice and between talk and action. So it's in this spirit that we bring you today's lecture by Dr. Sarah Sack on plastic pollution and human rights-based efforts to evade it. It's in this spirit as well that we continue our next talk from McGill, Sebastian Jojuan, on September 29th, on addressing and addressing the differential climate vulnerabilities of persons with disabilities. I take the occasion now to mark, in a similar spirit to my recollections of my heart and the commitment that his passing spurred, the recent passing of another social justice warrior who lives here in our community, disability rights activist Stephen Estee, who was taken from us this past Monday. Steve contributed centrally to the negotiation and drafting of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to the passage of provincial and national accessibility laws and to the recent passage of the Canada Disability Benefit and to many other human rights victories, domestic and international. Steve's passing is being marked this week by disability justice warriors around the world. We will strive here at the Health Justice Institute to keep building to on these critical foundations of health and social justice. So now it's finally to turn the spotlight to our own justice warrior, Professor Sarah Sack. Sarah is the Yogis and Keddie Chair in Human Rights Law and Director of the Marine and Environmental Law Institute here at the Shewitt School of Law. She teaches and researches and is a global scholarly leader at the intersection of environment and human rights, international law and business. Recent co-edited books include the 2021 Cambridge Handbook on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development and the 2021 Research Handbook on Climate Change Law and Laws and Damage as well as recent volumes of the Ocean Yearbook. In the last few years she's undertaken research contracts through Dalhousie with the UN Environmental Program on topics relating to business, human rights and the environment. These include a project elaborating on human rights-informed responsibilities or human rights-informed responsible business climate action and the focus of today's presentation, a human rights-based approach to plastic pollution. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Sack. Thank you, Sheila, for the wonderful introduction and it's a great pleasure and honor to be here sharing this work with you today. Yes. The photo here is from Von Wong Productions. The credit turned off the plastic tap. This is an image that was taken in Nairobi of a sculpture that was built at the time of discussions and negotiations around weather and if so how to address plastic pollution through a treaty. That process is ongoing and not yet finished and we'll see where it ends but it hadn't even begun at the time that I was asked to undertake the work that I'm going to share with you today. And the image is designed to signify really this need to turn off the plastic tap and that's going to be really difficult because plastics are everywhere and very much a part of our society and so this is another challenge but we can figure this out. So what I'm going to do today first is just briefly reflect on why plastic pollution can and must be thought of as a health problem and a health justice problem. Say a few words about the plastic treaty negotiation process and what led up to it. And then the focus is going to be sharing lessons from the development or training materials on a human rights based approach to plastic pollution which I was asked to undertake by the environment program. And here you can sort of subdivide what I'm going to share with you as materials that are focused on understanding the component parts of a right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment on the one hand. And on the other hand how to understand business responsibilities to respect human rights and circularity. Both through the lens of international legal instruments. And then finally I'll conclude just briefly with some reflections on plastics and health justice. So why think about plastics and health? What I did here was just to cut and paste a very small sample of headlines from the Guardian from 2020 and 2023 that say things like microplastics found in human blood for the first time. Microplastics found deep in lungs of living people for first time. Plastics cause wide ranging health issues from cancer to birth defects landmark study finds. Recycled plastic can be more toxic and is no fix for pollution. Greenpeace warns. Key messaging here is these are from studies from 2022 to 2023. And you can see that within them there's a large amount of first time and also uncertainty. This is reflected in where we are. So I'm guessing most of you probably aren't familiar with the Planetary Boundary Framework of the Stockholm Resilience Center. This has been ongoing for a while but what they've been trying to map are what they described as sort of planetary boundaries for different environmental problems. And there's actually a new one that came out two days ago after I made this slide and I didn't add it. You can go look that one up. But the key points here are in 2015 if you look at the top one you can see where climate change is. So the green is this is a safe operating space for humanity. The yellow is uh oh the orange is oh dear and including overshooting what are seen as planetary boundaries. Now the good news is if you look at ozone depletion it's nicely in the green and at one time it was in the yellow but we have an ozone treaty that actually works and so it's no longer in overshoot position. Again in that image you can see climate change which is really in the headlines now is actually sort of mildish yellow compared to some of the others like biodiversity loss that are in the orange. There's a little bit there called novel entities and I know you can't see the print because it's way too small but the novel entities part in 2015 says not yet quantified. In 2022 it was quantified and that's the giant orange thing there that looks like it's sort of going over the chart. This is referring to chemicals and toxic substances including plastics and plastics notably. And this one of the problems has been that since the 1950s these substances have been used increasingly increasingly increasingly and even in the last sort of 20 years the use of plastics has dramatically increased and is projected to continue to increase. But thinking back to the previous slide we're only just starting to understand what its implications are for human health. From the perspective of the UN environment program it's helpful sometimes to understand and to not just think about climate change on its own but rather to understand its relationship with other problems and so they're currently using this triple planetary crisis framing that talks about the interdependent nature of climate, nature loss, biodiversity, and pollution and waste. On the left is an image that we developed actually for the other project which was designed to sort of convey that the reason we're in this triple planetary crisis is really because of unsustainable production and consumption patterns and all of these have impacts on human rights and this includes rights to health. How did I get to being asked to do what it was that I'm going to share with you today? First of all the UN environment program has been aware that there's been a plastics issue for quite a long time but this has come from the obvious issue that has emerged in the context of the marine environment. So you can think about the huge collections of plastic trash circulating in different parts of the Pacific and so on and so on, pictures of marine mammals that are ingesting plastic bags and et cetera, et cetera. This has been something that people have been aware of for quite a long time and also particularly in some parts of the world there's been greater attention to the impacts on rivers, coastal communities, sewage, storm, water and infrastructure. So on part of the slide I have reference to the coordinating body of the East Asian seas. This is a regional seas instrument that is designed to address all kinds of things and marine litter at large which includes plastics has been on their agenda for a very long time. On the right is reference to the UN environment programs work gradually over the years recognizing plastic waste first as one of the biggest threats to the world's oceans and secondly noting the kind of initiatives it's undertaken including the global partnership on marine litter with the aim of bringing together government, civil society, local authorities, academia and the private sector to find realistic solutions to reducing and managing marine litter. And the aim of this of course is to address issues in the marine litter area that include economies, ecosystems, animal welfare and human health worldwide. So now March 2022 the UN Environment Assembly adopted a resolution towards negotiating an internationally legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution. As I say this is ongoing there will be a negotiating session in Canada in April 2024. There's a draft a zero draft of this treaty that's now available that one can look at and there are lots of different options on ways forward. One thing that's been very clear is the importance of taking what's described as a full life cycle approach to the plastics problem and I'll explain what that means in a moment. Now in 2021 I was approached by the UN Environment Program and somebody at the coordinating body of these agencies to undertake a preliminary research project which was to pull together a toolbox of resources on a plastic on a human rights based approach to plastic pollution. At the time I didn't know anything about plastic pollution this is not something I had been thinking about not on my agenda no idea. But it is something but certainly the human rights and environment intersection was something that was very much on my agenda as was business responsibilities for human rights and what that means through a human rights and environment lens. And the idea was first to pull together this toolbox of resources to share with their partners and secondly through a second contract to develop a set of training materials that could be delivered virtually in the region in collaboration with partners on a human rights based approach to plastic pollution with the aim of training businesses as well as states, governments, NGOs and everybody. I assembled a team a big team at first of lots of students to help me figure out what was going on. And then in contract two I was assisted in particular by a PhD candidate Kevin Burke and also by Victoria Kanyats who was an LLM candidate here at the time doing health law work. And so if you actually look at the C-Circular website you'll find a section there where they still have available videos of one of the training sessions that we did and you can access materials there and they're also available through the UN environment programs website more generally. COPSI and UNEP together created this initiative called C-Circular that's what this slide is about and their aim was very much to address the plastics crisis through what they're calling the plastic value chain and to inspire market-based solutions as well as encouraging enabling policies to prevent marine plastic pollution. So the project was not one that was linked to what should the plastics treaty look like. It was not one that was specific to if you think about environmental law how can we help states put in place better environmental laws in different areas. It was to draw upon ideas from international human rights law in relation to the environment and business responsibilities for human rights to develop trainings that would help us think about how to come up with solutions. The context one key piece of the context in the region and I'll note that the partners that we worked with were WWF in the Philippines who's done a lot of work on extended producer responsibility and also the Indonesian business council for sustainable development that's been working on a lot of circularity things. Partners shared with us ideas for different case studies that we integrated into the trainings and this was very I've sort of got them through the slides I won't spend much time talking about many of them but for some are useful I think for context. One is that in the Canadian context we use plastics we use way more plastics. Canadians and Americans use way more plastics than anybody in the world and we use far far more than anybody else. But we have this thing called municipal waste management where we use the plastics we stick them in something hopefully it's the right recycling container and then it's magically vanished from our. We don't really know where it goes. We'll get back to that in a minute because we should think about that a bit more. In terms of in the Philippines for example in many parts of the region that I was tasked with thinking about. There are not municipal waste management systems and so much of this work is done by informal workers often referred to as waste pickers and they have organized in different groups and are actually quite active in trying to ensure that they are included in the plastics treaty process. But one of the reasons that I was sort of called in I think was because of a sense that coming from a business and human rights perspective there's a lot of material and a lot of thinking about the responsibilities of businesses for workers and also informal workers and how to ensure that that responsibility is integrated into everything that business does. So this is sort of the context right it's a different one from in the Canadian context and the question is you know there's obviously a lot of impact on informal sector workers who are working with the you know collecting these wastes and a lot of health protection issues. But another piece referring back to our magically disappearing municipal plastic waste is the problem that historically wealthy nations have been tending to export a lot of their plastic waste to other nations despite lots of international law that would suggest this may not be something one can do. China was historically importing a lot of it and in 2017 they said okay that's enough we're not taking it anymore started going to lots of other countries in the region and some states started to ban it but unfortunately that's often not the end of it it sort of just led to increased in illegal imports illegal dumping and illegal incineration. So on top of all the issues all of the challenges in the southeast Asian countries themselves is the challenge and it's not just in Asian countries there's also a lot going on in the African context for example they're having to deal with the waste from the west. Okay. So business and human rights this is again a weird thing that many people don't know much about but it's actually gaining more and more increasing credibility and so this is again why I was asked to assist. So generally speaking we think of states as duty bearers in human rights law states having a duty to protect in the environmental context we expect states to pass laws and to regulate things we expect our rights and everything to be protected by states but of course international human rights law exists because states often don't do their job they often violate rights. The question from a business perspective is if a state is violating rights do you as a business just say well hey I'm complying with state law done sorry not my problem or is there a responsibility under international human rights law that all actors need to step up and pay attention to human rights and take on human rights responsibilities and this has been a very long-standing discussion at the human rights council in various human rights sectors and the short version of the story is that in 2011 the UN Human Rights Council adopted guiding principles on business and human rights that reflect what's referred to as the protect respect remedy framework they were developed through a multi-stakeholder process I was involved at different stages in some of this and so I'm very familiar with the history content and how this is supposed to operate. The state duty of course states are supposed to do their thing that includes regulating businesses but when they don't businesses are not off the hook businesses should never assume they're off the hook businesses have their own independent responsibility to respect human rights and this includes to adopt a policy commitment to human rights to engage in human rights due diligence processes and to ensure remediation of human rights harms and the third pillar focuses in on access to remedy at the same time a lot of work has been going on at the human rights council on human rights and environment and human rights and toxic substances we now have a new special rapporteur focused on climate change there's been a special rapporteur working on health for a really long time and I was quite familiar with this work and so putting together the work of the special rapporteurs on toxic substances and on human rights and environment into thinking about the plastic problem with the aim of developing guidance for business seem to be what our mission was so I'll note that the special rapporteur on toxics and human rights there being several of them and there being some really incredibly useful reports coming out of there some recent one that came right as we were starting this work was very specifically focused on plastics but there were other ones from the past that had had developed principles on the rights of workers formal and informal in relation to toxics precautionary principles in the toxic context right to science the special rapporteurs on human rights and the environment had also developed lots of different useful materials perhaps most notably the 2018 framework principles on human rights and the environment developed by John Knox and John Knox's reports but also more recently many of David Boyd's reports fleshing out aspects of a holistic understanding of a right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment where what served as our sort of background materials as we tried to figure out what we were going to do in these training materials and so this is what we did first again the task was to look at the full life cycle of plastics our tendency is you know we use it we stick it in there recycling and we assume it gets recycled but in fact an astonishingly small amount of plastic is effectively recycled globally it's about nine percent the other problem is if we care about climate change we should care about climate about plastics because virgin plastics are ninety nine percent derived from fossil fuels and so if you look at the linear plastic cycle and you start with extraction of fossil fuels through production transportation use consumption waste generation waste management and disposal and if at the disposal stage things are in landfills incinerated or dumped they're not going back into being part of new plastics and so we have more extraction of fossil fuels this is a problem for all kinds of reasons but including relates very clearly to climate in fact there are many who think that as pressure has been put on fossil fuel oil and gas producers to reduce production due to climate change there has been a strategy shift to increase plastic production as we were again looking through each of these stages and our first set of training slides actually go through each of these stages and sort of explore the human rights implications at each one and I'm not sharing that with you. We drew heavily on the report of the Marcus Orlana on the special repertoire of toxic substances in human rights and his report on plastics which hopefully covered human rights implications at each stage. Again I could spend easily twenty minutes on this and I'm not going to so if you're interested lots of training materials available online but yeah the aim again from the UN environments programs perspective in particular is for us to move away from what they describe as the take make waste linear fossil fuel dependent plastic cycle and to move instead towards circularity. Now what circularity means is something we'll talk about a little bit but the main reason for this again is first there are human rights impacts at each stage and you know secondly it's just contributing to the continuing need to extract fossil fuels and this is clearly not something we should be doing. So that report came out in 2021. As we were starting our work in this area one big question for us was to what extent we draw upon the full range of human rights in the materials rights to life right to health go you know sort of unpacking all of the different instruments that have informed all of the work of the different special rapporteurs to come up with the work that they have or whether we should take a slightly different approach and to think in a sense more simply about framing this as something that could be solved through the adoption of what we're describing as sort of a holistic understanding of a right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment. After or just before we presented I guess our final training in July 2022 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution which recognized the right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment as a human right. There's a lot of things that are interesting about that resolution and it followed one from the Human Rights Council in November 2021 which is slightly different but for our purposes what was particularly helpful I guess is that the UN General Assembly resolution also acknowledges the UN guiding principles on business and human rights. So within that recognition from the General Assembly no states voting against Canada did indeed vote in favor there was this I mean we didn't know at the time we were developing the materials but once their recognition happened it seemed a particularly good idea that we had in fact decided to adopt the right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment as a framework. The other reason for taking that approach is that while in the Canadian context we do not have constitutional recognition of such a right at all we have you know Quebec has a bit there's some stuff going on but it's generally not it's generally seen as this kind of you know a non-thing in Canada right. The very first conversation I had with our partners at the Indonesian Business Council for Sustainable Development she referred to the right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment why well it's constitutionalized in Indonesia in fact it's constitutionalized in a number of the partner countries that we're working with and it already is constitutionalized or very much a part of the law in many countries in Indonesia. And so that's also another reason for having adopted this sort of as a framework. So what does it mean to adopt it as a framework? Drawing on John Knox's 2018 framework principles is a very helpful structure which I think is sort of hinted at in the first three principles. First that states should ensure a safe clean healthy and sustainable environment in order to respect, protect and fulfill human rights. But secondly states should respect, protect and fulfill human rights in order to ensure a safe clean healthy and sustainable environment. And then third states should prohibit discrimination and ensure equal and that sounds wrong and equal and something in relation to whoa in relation to the enjoyment of a safe clean environment something there's a miss word missing there. Key point being that equity and non-discrimination is a cross cutting aspect of a framework that draws on the right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment. And so equity and non-discrimination must be understood as cross cutting all of this. So and that's I should just say this is we were asked to develop you know visuals to accompany our work. And so with some great help with that we did this in this particular image is designed to capture this sort of holistic understanding. So in the blue is the idea of substantive dimensions of the right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment clean air, safe climate, clean water, healthy ecosystems and biodiversity, healthy food and non-toxic places. On the left are procedural rights protections and I will actually scroll through some other slides on that for a minute and then underneath is this cross cutting guarantee of equity and non-discrimination, the importance of centering groups and individuals who are disproportionately affected by environmental harms. So I'm going to very quickly scroll through a bunch of slides here in fact about 30 slides just to give you a sense of some of the stuff that we had in these training materials before I then sort of turn to reflections on where we are. So what we were trying to do drawing on different reports of different special operators in particular was to reflect on what would it mean if we all sought a right to clean air in relation to the different stages of the plastics life cycle. Similarly what would it mean for a safe climate? What would a right to clean air look like through each stage of the plastics cycle? Health ecosystems and biodiversity, right to healthy food, non-toxic places. And then we asked our participants to reflect on their own organization's contributions. So evaluate how the contributions of your business or organization to the plastic life cycle impacts the substantive components of the right including these different aspects. And then again rather than sort of looking at a you're bad, you know don't be bad. We took a and how can you be good approach? So the last part is does your business or organization take proactive action to support the substantive components of this right? And what would that look like? Similarly with the procedural components we drew on the work of the framework principles on human rights in the environment and also the work of the special rapporteur on toxics to contemplate the different procedural dimensions. Which includes, so from international environmental law we often talk about sort of the three pillars of rights to information, public participation and access to justice. This is fleshed out in lots of different instruments and here through the framework principles we have it more expensively understood as including rights to freedom of expression and association to education and information and principle four from the framework principles notes a very crucial dimension which is the importance of ensuring that there is a safe and enabling environment for those who are described as environmental human rights defenders to operate free from threats, harassment intimidation and violence and that's a huge issue in many parts of the world and it's not one that Canada is immune to. And so this is our next set of sort of you know how to think about this problem from a procedural rights perspective trying to see the okay just I'm watching my time over there I'm good okay there's a bit of a reflection off it so I can't see can't quite see it but we're good excellent perfect so in the next set of slides then we drew upon these materials to pull out some sort of essential pieces for thinking about prevention, precaution, impact assessment and application here in part the importance of avoiding false solutions because one of the problems is sometimes in the effort to quickly address the problem whether it's climate change or plastics one can adopt solutions that may be worse or just create different problems from the ones that one is trying to avoid and so always adopting a preventative and precautionary approach and ensuring that proper impact assessment is carried out is essential and this includes from a business and human rights perspective the idea of business and human rights impact assessment so from here you know and I don't think I've noted this but you know plastics we you know there can be many classes on what are plastics and how do we understand the different pieces and etc etc and we're not doing that here but one of the other problems is chemical additives to different plastics so often you can have all kinds of stuff in there and if it's not properly labeled and tracked then even somebody who's trying to recycle plastics will be putting things together and have no idea what it actually is and what the synergistic effects might be so you can't do your prior assessment if you don't have information and so the functional aspects are crucial and so therefore an entire slide on access to information the right to science, education, public awareness public participation noting of course that some communities have different rights than others so if we're thinking about self-determination rights of Indigenous communities this is something that's important to highlight as well and then accountability and access to justice and remedy and again we had a reflection, identify steps your organization is taking in supporting the exercise of the procedural components and this includes reflecting on how your organization might be supporting human rights defenders the last part, equity and vulnerability this cross cutting piece again notes the importance drawing on the framework principles of prohibiting discrimination ensuring equal and effective protection but also the need to take additional measures to protect the rights of those who are most vulnerable to or at particular risk from environmental harm taking into account their needs, risks and capacities an important piece of this that comes through in the 2018 guiding principles guiding principles, framework principles is the need to understand that many people may be particularly vulnerable to environmental harms because they have been historically discriminated against and so integrating an understanding of sort of how to move beyond colonial practices and histories as part of this assessment of how to ensure and support those vulnerable or at particular risk is part of the process and so again we have a whole bunch of slides that also note the importance of thinking from an intersectional perspective but of course in these trainings there's only sort of so much we can do we went through lots of different groups thinking about it the formal and informal workers were obviously a part of this I'll just note the racial or other minorities and persons living in poverty there is a lot of work that the different special operators have been done on environmental justice issues relating to the sighting of hazardous hazardous whether it's hazardous, whether it's the waste at the waste sort of stage of it or whether it's at the production phase and so that's obviously again a part of the discussion and so again asking them to reflect on all these different aspects so identify rights holders who may be disproportionately impacted by your organization's contribution to the plastic's life cycle including and identify how and when your organization interacts with environmental human rights defenders make a commitment to protect, support and collaborate with them to enable human rights responsible plastics action so in the next bit I'll just very quickly make reference to again some of the case studies that were hopefully shared by our partners and our partners were working on different aspects of this in particular on the importance of how to ensure extended producer responsibility models were integrated into laws and policies in the region and other related things in the Philippines there's a particular problem with what's referred to as the sachet economy and corporate actors have contributed greatly to this problem but it's also sort of in a weird way one that's targeted at addressing or enabling access to products by those who are poor and so sachets very small sachets filled with lots of common household commodities like toothpaste shampoo, coffee, cooking oil are available to be purchased in sort of little single use things and if you can't afford to buy the whole bottle it's helpful to be able to buy the little sachet right of course from the brand's perspective maybe it's more expensive to buy 30 sachets than to buy one bottle of the same amount but if you're poor and the whole bottle then you're going to go with the sachets right they're very common the suggestion was that there were 163 million sachets used per day in the Philippines and this caused all kinds of different problems but what's the solution so at the time Unilever was trying claiming to be putting in place some kind of recycling program to turn the sachets into school chairs and the idea was that the collection of this sachet waste would create opportunities for informal waste pickers and there's also this idea of a plastic crediting model that would come in there's a lot of questions as to whether that ever really got off the ground in the way it was supposed to and that was part of some of our discussions in some of the sessions including with representative of Unilever but of course ideally there would be less dependency on the sachets and on the single use plastics now how to move away from that is tricky I don't have a slide on this but I'll just note that following this work I was working with my post octani prior on thinking through the plastics challenges in the arctic context and a different group has done a study with the Sami in which the they were studying in a sense was what were all the sort of local practices before people started using plastics so what are the things that what are the practices and the ways that have been replaced by the plastic economy and how can or should they be brought you know be better supported so that's a really important and tricky and local question but really important part of it and then we had little reflections on these right like how do we think through this problem using these different components of an environmental human rights lens what would this mean and also transitioning into our third model which was focused on business responsibilities what would it mean for businesses to take responsible action to prevent and remedy the human rights impact identified and also an awareness of might the solution suggested different human rights concerns so I've already mentioned the guiding principles on business and human rights and I'll just quickly note that the guiding principles have been implemented in all kinds of other responsible business conduct guidance tools there is a working group on business and human rights at the human rights council they have helpfully come out with different kinds of reports including one specifically aimed at ensuring respect for human rights defenders which is very helpful in suggesting to businesses and others that if we're actually serious about sustainable action instead of looking at human rights defenders as enemies to be you know shut down and litigated against one should treat them as knowledge holders with important knowledge and ideas that should be valued and incorporated into way steps forward and so we ask businesses what would it mean for you to adopt business and human rights approaches and I'll note at the time while we were working with the UN environment program I was following closely and know people within the UN development program who had been launching at the same time a very rich business and human rights in Asia program and so there's some parallels and overlaps but these aren't the only ones there's also the UN global compact that has been doing work on responsible business conduct including sustainable ocean principles and so we shared some of the principles from this with participants there's the work of the OECD it's guidelines for multinational enterprises it's due diligence guidance and in particular this sort of model which is very useful in terms of how to think about problems and solutions and adopting risk-based due diligence to address human rights and environmental and other issues and so we developed various little images to try to share and reflect what would it mean to adopt a human rights and circularity embedded approach to product design what would it mean to do the same for waste management and then there's the question of responsibility liability and remedy so in the climate context I will say as an aside it's a massive missing piece of the climate regime which is highly problematic and we have seen and it seemed particularly appropriate in the context of the region to reflect on the responsibility and liability piece because the Human Rights Commission of the Philippines had engaged in a many year long inquiry into the responsibilities of businesses for climate change coming from their report we reflected on how could that report apply or be thought of in light of the plastics problems could, should plastic producers also be held viable for the human rights and environmental impacts of plastic pollution and waste as well as each stage of the life cycle we reflected on what the different special rapporteurs say about remedy and we developed our little business and human rights informed kind of image to think about the responsibilities of businesses and how their shifts depending on whether they have caused the problem contributed to it or are directly linked and went from there again lots of different case studies we could share I'll probably end with this and then a few reflections and this I think points to the complexity again of the problem this case study was shared with us by our Indonesian partners and it's the problem of a tofu factory that for a very long time was burning plastics for fuel because the plastics were that was the cheapest way they could get fuel the problem is that they weren't aware of all of the toxins that were coming out of the plastic as it was being burned and what its implications were for local food systems so once this information had been shared and revealed they then shifted and they shifted to burning firewood and of course that will have its own implications if there's a shortage if one is concerned about deforestation and their issues there I think this one illustrates also the way in which the plastics crisis is very much intertwined with the climate crisis and energy access as a part of it so their questions as to whether are there good ways of burning or incinerating plastics such as to use them as an energy source and there are very hotly held opinions on either side of that are there ways of doing chemical waste recycling that could be safe or is this again something that's likely to be cited in low income communities of color where the negative impacts will be disproportionately felt this is ongoing all over and so we reflected on that case study there's another circularity case study and from this you know here we are lessons from this human rights based approach to plastics for health justice for Canada I was asked to do this work for a very different context and I haven't had the time or the funding to reflect on okay what are we actually doing in the Canadian context I do know that you know the federal government has taken a few steps forward to try to address some plastics issues and is currently regulatory initiatives are being challenged by a group that calls themselves the responsible plastics coalition because as is always we spend a lot of time in environmental law talking about how the government passes a law and then they get told that it was beyond their jurisdiction under federalism doctrines you know it's sort of this back and forth right can the federal government regulate this is this something that's a provincial municipal thing if they do it how should they do it so we're sort of wrapped in that the usual environmental federalism frustrated unhelpful space unfortunately as part of what's going on but more generally the business and human rights approach and the right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment neither of them are well known well understood well integrated in the Canadian context these are actually better understood in many parts of the world outside of Canada but I think the time is right and I'm grateful for the opportunity to share these materials precisely for that reason I think the time is right for us to turn our minds to what the potential might be of these kind of instruments these kind of teachings these kind of thinking for being more responsible consumers producers of plastics and for ensuring that information is gathered and available and known about the impacts of these products and others that we use including for health and environmental justice both which are intertwined and I think that's all I was going to say we have plenty of time for questions and Sarah I can let you field I see Andrea in the back there with one to start and maybe I'll let you field them after that okay please hi what was super interesting about the process of the UN guiding principles on business and human rights is that it very much involved businesses business organizations were very much there as were human rights groups I had the weird experience of co-convening the only North American consultation as part of that process which involved bringing together corporate and securities lawyers from all over the world as well as businesses as well as human rights groups and I was accidentally copied on a message sent to somebody saying why would we go to this meeting with all these business people and I think the business and human rights movement has tried to change that and I think has been successful in starting a conversation so there's an annual forum in Geneva the UN forum on business and human rights and you will see the big monthly nationals there and all the human rights groups and rights holders and there are not happy conversations important conversations that take place and coming out of this we were asked to do the trainings but there's also and we did all of this stuff virtually there's also through the supported UNDP and others now a big Asian forum on business and human rights and again the business act the large scale businesses are there there's recently a new African forum on business and human rights it's going to be it's not an easier quick process the educational piece is crucial businesses can't and won't do anything if they don't know what they're supposed to do and so if we keep teaching things as if businesses are always or never have the potential of embracing these things we can't make the motion now there's a lot that can also be said about structures of corporate law and how that needs to shift as part of this and that's again you know something I can speak to let's say it's slowly starting absolutely I made the mistake Natalie and I were talking about this yesterday you're supposed to have a pen so you can write down your questions of course I forgot to bring the pen so you might need to remind me of that first one no hang on okay I know I know so in the first thing so this is a very simplified version thank you this is a very simplified version of what is essentially I mean you had been to put together sort of a 20 to 40 page background document and our background document is huge by comparison to that because it's so complicated and because you know when I say plastics that's an immense simplification right there's all kinds of different kinds and for details you can look at you know all the different work that you now had done in engaging with with our colleagues we had them and we had circulars being quite active in this trying to seek sort of good examples of producers that are transitioning so you have to look at or transforming their operations you have to kind of look at what is it that they're doing what are they transforming from and to some of it is easy a tremendous amount of plastics goes into packaging it's completely unnecessary in many many cases easy to just you know stop in other cases plastics used in the medical community and different kinds of plastics as you say so again it's complicated and we attempted to we attempted to not excuse me we totally losing my voice not sure why we attempted to be sufficiently general given the nature of what we were doing but at the same time to provide little sort of opportunities of guidance for some of the specifics oh my gosh now I forgot the second question which was impact assessment yes okay so some interesting thoughts on this I mean one question which is not your question is what should go through impact assessment so if you go back to thinking about the plastics life cycle we know impact assessment in the environmental impact assessment that happens sort of on the fossil fuel stage not not enough not too much that really happens when it comes to the building of petrochemical facilities transport so there's an example where a ship that was you know carrying plastic pellets filled this huge amount of them in and I forget where they were off the coast but it caused like a huge environmental disaster should there be an impact assessment of shipping and what is on ships same with rail lines most people have no idea what's going on the rail lines that are going past and a lot of this is stuff that if it spills is going to cause a disaster as we know but people don't know about it so impact assessment sort of more broadly should perhaps be used more people should have more access to information about what's going on at each stage then it comes down to what kind of impact assessment and that's tricky the you know human rights and environmental assessment is a tool that's been around for a long time the human rights impact assessment can be and should be integrated into environmental assessment I think in a holistic kind of way and we're starting to see that but then there's strategic and etc etc I know you know a lot about that Patricia and then yeah initially in the work that I done in the business and human rights context and human rights and environment context I hadn't grappled with the circularity question so this project was I mean it was immensely eye-opening for me on so many levels but one of them was the need to think about circularity at the same time as thinking about human rights that those two have to go together then it becomes a question of sort of how to do this and what that means I'll note that having the will to actually do something is the first step and so again I have not done the deep dive research in the Canadian context but I have some concerns we know we have a fossil fuel dependent country and in particular that Alberta is I mean Alberta is not the only one but Alberta is perhaps particularly keen on continuing the fossil fuel economy the federal government has said every now and then and sort of stepped up and looked like it's playing an active role in the how to address plastics and yet at the same time I saw within the last year you know statements from Alberta that building more petrochemical plants so as to produce more plastics was on the agenda and federal government support for that right I'm like okay that's not looking good right so that's the first thing but there's also a lot of I mean this is in a sense side stepping but not so much some real concerns also in how the structure of the treaty is going to unfold so we know in the climate context that there's the use of offsets and questions as to whether if you're actually you know you're getting a credit to offset your emissions we're not actually reducing your emissions we're seeing the same potential stuff through this idea of plastic credits and circularity emerging in the plastic context some of this is partnering with informal waste pickers ensuring that they're supported that they have better lifestyle and health things but at the same time gathering the waste might help keep it out of the marine environment but what happens with it when it's being gathered so there might be a credit that's given because a company is helping ensure it's gathered but then we don't know what's happening next I mean if that kind of thing gets embedded in the treaty we're in the same, exactly in the same spot as we are with climate which is we're pretending to do stuff but we're not right anyway there's more that could be said about that but I'll just note the the other thing is when I was doing all of this about circularity but I'm seeing now some people saying circularity is the wrong thing we need a regenerative economy and that that's even different and beyond I think there's one question here and then one over here so absolutely it's really important to be very aware of that and one can't say that the human rights based approach will capture everything but there's the potential for it to capture more than it might traditionally be thought to capture by attention to this exploring the human rights approach to what is referred to in this particular report by John Knox to a healthy biosphere so if you, if instead of thinking of humans over here and environment is over here ecosystems is over here if we can move to better understandings that humans are part of ecosystems in the biosphere and harming the biosphere is harming humans then a human rights based approach can help to overcome the limitations like that enriched understanding enriched and changed understanding of the human I think is sort of at the center of it but that must be central to it otherwise absolutely all those risks and limitations are there my sense to be honest overall is that most people don't actually understand what a right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment means and certainly don't understand all of its component parts and so there's a real tendency and we see this in sustainable development as an example sustainable development is often described as balancing environment, economy and society and they're all understood as separate but they're not and balancing is the wrong thing and that needs to be confronted but it can't be confronted if people don't actually if we don't train and talk about it so in that image it's not balancing ecosystems there are planetary boundaries there are healthy ecosystems as a floor and you can't have sustainable and resilient societies without healthy ecosystems and economy is part of that and all I can say is right now the dominant way in which all of this stuff is taught is not in a way that takes what I call an eco-relational approach to the human and to economy so it's starting with training starting with training starting with this sharing hoping that some people in here might think this is useful and for us to work with and definitely doing it with industry and industry associations this isn't the I think any audience is the right group I think there's real I think it's really important to have the other ones but I will say at the same time we were doing this we were doing a project with the OECD on responsible business climate action and you know that's some same ideas but you know much trickier audience because the OECD has to kind of satisfy all of its constituents and they're going to not want you know you not want you to rock the boat too much but I think I think increasingly so I'm the optimist I think education can play a role and I really do think that increasingly people are realizing that I'm hopeful that people are realizing that maybe new ways of thinking and knowing is going to help us move this forward but yeah thank you I hate to do this we've we're out of time so I'm going to please just stick in your chairs for one second longer so we can properly thank you and recognize just the value of what what we just heard today I also want to invite you if you happen to be sticking around to a gathering just an informal gathering that some that we're having between 3 and 5 today in room 411 so health law students, environment law students are invited to come and interact with faculty to talk a little bit more about these very questions the interaction of health and environment and the laws that apply international law, marine law our visitor Natalie Klein is also we're so grateful to have her here from University of New South Wales and she's also going to be present and there may even be a little bit of food if you can hang on until then but I enjoyed that last intervention because I was reminded again that this is an international day of action it's a global strike for climate justice there's a really interesting tension for me and some people felt it quite viscerally am I going to the strike where I'm going to stand in the streets or do what I do in the streets or am I coming to this talk and you're weighing those things there what is the value of talking and educating ourselves and others about these legal norms and regimes that Sarah we've heard today is so actively working inside and outside and really pushing what the inside is or was these questions of jurisdiction are just fundamental to what you've presented to us jurisdiction around is it just the state, is it the what is business, what is the point of this thing we call business right so Sarah that seems to be starting to riff last couple words I first met so I've already given you my formal introduction to Sarah's that but I wanted to just at this I first met Sarah in a lineup on our first day of law school in Toronto and she sort of turned around and we locked I and I could see right away that she had this tremendous you know quiet sort of outsider intelligence and I just knew you are my people and so in my own words Sarah is a big uncompromising dreamer and doer so Sarah steps up and just to go back to I'm sorry with the sad story I started with when we so tragically lost our colleague mine heart a year ago Sarah let go desperately awaited sabbatical the various teaching and other institutional you know urgent needs that arose so suddenly and she did that with her usual grace and her unyielding you know excellence and her willingness to do the work that's required to build a strong and sustainable community of research and teaching and social and climate justice leadership and so just this you know last point and Sarah don't know how hard but you know your scholarship your guidance of a whole raft like bevy of graduate brilliant graduate students your enormous willingness to do the work of and that includes the mostly uncelebrated work behind the scenes that's needed to shift law and practice to help climate justice is just an inspiration to us all so please join me again this is a poster of our health law our health justice seminar series I still have to adjust I noted that our next lecture is September 29th Professor Sebastian from talking about the climate vulnerability of people with disabilities how do we address that again we're from talk to action please come bring your friends and I want to just note the one after that on November 3rd so about a month later is only online that's the only one all year online Stanford professor grab your belt is going to talk about the American insanity defense and I really encourage it she's an incredibly sparky scholar so you really want to sign on to that one by zoom webinar and otherwise take a look at the full array of lectures and come on out thank you