For more than three years a Calgary grocery co-operative thought it was on the right side of the environment when it came to its compostable checkout bags.

The bags are manufactured locally by Leaf Environmental Products, a Calgary company, and certified as commercially compostable by a U.S. organization.

Shoppers love the bags because they’re “Green Cart Approved,” which means the city allows their use as liners for countertop green bins.

But the bags have run afoul of Canada’s ban on single-use plastics.

The government ban includes not only conventional fossil-fuel based single-use plastics, but also those that are made of compostable, bio-based or biodegradable materials — lumped together as “non-conventional plastics” — which the government said has many of the same negative qualities as plastic.

“I understand where they’re going,” said Ken Keelor, the CEO of Calgary Co-op. “What they’re saying is ‘look a lot of plastic is used at the front end of stores. We want that gone,’” said Keelor. “But we didn’t wait for the ban.”

“And now we’re going to have our knuckles rapped and actually be disadvantaged versus other grocers potentially because reusable bags cost about a buck for our customers,” said Keelor, compared to $0.15 for compostable. “Paper bags are cheaper. But we don’t believe in paper. So we’re in a real dilemma.”

The federal ban on the manufacture and import for sale of single-use plastic checkout bags, cutlery, food service ware made of certain types of plastic, stir sticks and straws came into effect in December. Plastic ring carriers will face the same ban this June.

Plastic is difficult to recycle and more often ends up in landfill or in the ocean, where it can have devastating impacts on marine environments, which has led to a global move to reduce its use.

Canada’s federal environment and climate change ministry said in an email that compostable bags “contaminate recycling streams; and they have not proven to perform better than conventional plastics when littered on land or in water.” The bags “remain a threat of harm to wildlife, are difficult to recycle and have available alternatives.”

The ministry went on to say that compostable plastics are also “screened out by most organics facilities and sent to landfill because they have longer biodegradation times than food and yard waste.”

Those statements are a bit of head scratcher for Jerry Gao, the owner of Leaf, because federal environment ministry officials told both Gao and Keelor that the grocery bags could still be sold in bundles on the shelf, but not at the till.

“They said it’s a visibility issue,” said Gao, a former accountant who said he started his company to make a difference to the environment. “I got really mad and said I don’t know what that word visibility means, but to me, if we’re doing the right thing, we should actually do the right thing instead of appear to do the right thing,” he said.

As well, the compostable grocery bags he manufactures have been tested by the City of Calgary and break down in municipal compost.

Because of that, “we have strong support from our city council, our mayor and others, as well as from the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, who we’ve been working with,” said Keelor. The co-op is hoping for an exemption.

Fiesta Farms in Toronto also sells the product, a move that since December has saved the use of 250,000 plastic bags, said Kendra Sozinho, assistant store manager. Sozinho said there was no way the store would consider selling paper bags because they don’t want to kill trees and paper bags take more energy to produce than plastic

The ban “doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Sozinho. “Why can I sell them on my shelf, but I can’t use them to carry out groceries. What’s the difference? I think if we’re trying to take the necessary steps to change — (with the) things that are going on in the world — that’s not really one leap forward. It’s kind of taking a step back.”

That said, one problematic issue is that more municipalities are moving away from large municipal compost piles, where it can take months for organics to break down — which is the timeline that certified compostables need to meet — towards anaerobic digestion, which has a much shorter timeline.

That means that in municipalities such as Toronto, compostable bags, along with any contaminants, have to be screened out of Green Bin organics before they are put in the digester.

The city’s waste department, Solid Waste Management Services, said even if the compostable products made it to the anaerobic digesters, there are no applicable certification standards for compostable products that could meet the requirements of anaerobic digestion facilities, which break down organics, in a closed environment without oxygen, in only 15 days.

The solids are sent to contractors where it is turned into high quality compost, according the city’s waste department. The raw biogas is turned into renewable natural gas and injected into the natural gas grid.

Another problem, said Toronto’s waste department, is that some compostable products can contain harmful chemicals called polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS, which are sometimes used to create a barrier that can hold up to grease and liquids.

Those chemicals were found in a recent study of compostable bowls used in Canada, but that is not the case with Gao’s bags or the other compostable products that he makes because they don’t include the chemical responsible for PFAS.

All of this is not to say that compostables couldn’t evolve to meet new requirements, said Paul van der Werf, adjunct professor in the department of geography at Western University.

“The certified compostable plastics that are out there are good. They’re well developed. They’re plant based. They will decompose somewhere,” said van der Werf. Decomposition is “a bit more challenging in an anaerobic system,” he said.

What “needs to happen is to shorten the decomposition time so that it can break down within the sort of regular time of the waste composting and work its way through a digestion system,” said van der Werf. “That’s the innovation I think that really needs to happen.”

Meanwhile, if the ban isn’t confusing enough said Gao, the government is working on regulations that will require products labelled as compostable to meet specified standards and certification requirements, as well as rules around what can be labelled compostable.

There are currently international and North American criteria for certification, which can be done by organizations such as BPI in the U.S., or BNQ in Quebec, but certification is voluntarily.

Environment and Climate Change Canada said it will publish a more detailed regulatory framework paper for consultation in next few weeks and publish the proposed regulations in the Canada Gazette as early as this fall.

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