Date published: 2006/03/24
Jane Bickerstaffe in a personal viewpoint on the BBC says:
The humble and much maligned thin plastic carrier bag is at least as much a household hero as the pantomime villain it is often (mis)cast to be.
A recent UK government-funded initiative to look at ways to reduce use of thin bags found that people don't want more re-usable "Bags for Life" - they already have plenty in their homes - they just forget to take them to the shops!
Surely, though, it's not that difficult if we are planning a shopping trip to remember to take our own bags.
We manage when we are on holiday in Italy or Spain, where the practice is more commonplace.
It might be different on ad-hoc trips, but still it is not necessary to always accept a new bag. One national UK pharmacy chain has trained its staff to ask customers whether they really need a bag.
All packaging (including carrier bags) has a tiny environmental impact compared with the impact of heating our homes and using private transport, let alone flying.
Putting a tax on carrier bags does nothing to help the environment. It simply adds costs and penalises those who can least afford to pay - the elderly and those without cars.
Another argument commonly directed against plastic bags is that they do not quickly degrade in landfill. These bags represent just 0.3% of household waste sent to landfill and the fact that they are relatively inert and stable is an advantage.
Biodegradable waste, on the other hand, such as potato peelings, some degradable plastics, junk mail and newspapers, does break down in landfill and releases greenhouse gases. This is why a European Landfill Directive has set targets to reduce the amount of biodegradable material landfilled.
However, a number of governments around the world are considering introducing, or have introduced, taxes or bans on plastic carrier bags. The reasons vary according to the country.
The Irish Government, for example, claimed that the sole purpose of taxing plastic bags was to solve a litter problem.
Yet two years after the introduction of the tax, plastic carrier bags still constituted 0.25% of litter according to the Irish Litter Monitoring Body.
In the UK, with no such tax, they were only 0.06% of litter, according to a survey commissioned by Incpen and carried out by Encams, the charity which runs the Keep Britain Tidy campaign.
...
According to the UK government's environment department, over 80% of plastic bags are re-used by British households.Once a bag has completed its task of transporting purchases from shop to home, it becomes a bin liner, a disposable nappy bag, or something to carry muddy football boots in.
In practice, the tax in Ireland has actually had a negative effect on the environment.
Deprived of thin bags, people have had to buy tailor-made bags. Tesco reports selling 80% more pedal bin liners and SuperQuinn supermarket 84% more disposable nappy bags; these are thicker and use more resources.
Marks & Spencer reports using three times as many lorries to transport alternative bags to their Irish stores with a resulting rise in exhaust emissions and traffic nuisance.
If only the BBC had more articles with some common sense, instead of the usual diet of the usual trite propaganda of the usual suspects. The one negative is that the author, Jane Bickerstaffe, is a director of Incpen, the Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment, so the article immediately becomes suspect. (What has been left out?)
The so-called environmentalists demonise most of modern life, and the plastic bag is just another one of their pet hates that they constantly get hysterical about (indeed the Green Party manifesto in the 2005 election laughably singled out plastic bags for mention). But, as the article points out, most people re-use their plastic bags, and if you lack simple plastic bags (as handed out by most shops in England) then you instead have to buy special-purpose bags for your rubbish, and that is much worse. Unfortunately this is the kind of simple and obvious thing that completely escapes people who put hatred of consumerism above common sense.
Emmaus, that wonderful charity for the homeless, has a shop in Landbeach, not far from Cambridge. A year or two ago they switched from plastic to paper bags, for environmental reasons (they believe the propaganda put out by the so-called environmentalists). But those paper bags are completely useless. They tear at the first excuse and are hardly ever re-used. They are almost certainly worse for the environment. They cost much more, which already indicates there is a huge upfront cost in energy, even ignoring the re-use issue (which cannot be ignored).
Of course many people probably have a stash of plastic bags a mile high in their homes, so we receive far more than we can use. And plastic bags in the open can cause problems for animals (although, for example, some birds are happy to use plastic in their nests). But compared to all the other problems of the world, the simple plastic bag does not really rate as an important issue, except to people who have nothing else to do with their lives than worry about what other people do.
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