Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, garbage is a problem. My colleagues here in the House have spoken about the need to remove large amounts of hazardous waste from community landfills. This is important. And we also need to figure out ways to stop that waste from getting into those landfills in the first place.
One positive local initiative by Kavanaugh Brothers, which is part of the Det’on Cho group of companies, is to look at opportunities to prevent old tires from going into our landfills and also avoid the cost and GHG emissions from having to ship all our old tires back down south for processing. Instead, Kavanaugh is looking at creative ways we can use shredded tire material, and as of September 2022, over 200,000 tires have been shredded in Hay River and Yellowknife.
So that's an example of a circular economy, which means that we try to use and repair and reuse materials as much as we can instead of just throwing everything into a landfill and buying new things all the time. It's good for the environment. It's good for our pocketbooks. And it's good for our economy because we can turn old things into new products that are useful and could even be sold.
Other ways to keep big or hazardous materials out of landfills is recycling. Currently, 11 communities in the NWT, from Kakisa to Norman Wells, have been able to recycle electronics and electrical products such as lawnmowers, vacuums, power tools, even solar panels once they've reached the end of their useful life.
During the last Assembly, the Waste Reduction Act was passed which gives us the power to introduce extended producer responsibility. So that means we could require the companies that make those products in the first place to take them back once we're done with them. That could take a lot of burden off of our communities, who are spending many millions of dollars on creating and managing landfills. If companies have to pay for and deal with the waste that they create in the first place, it could push them to make products differently, to make them last longer, with materials that are less hazardous, and make them easier to reuse and recycle. Mr. Speaker, I will have questions for the Minister of ECC. Thank you.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Members' statements. Member from Frame Lake.
