EU Plastic Bag Debate Highlights a Wider Global Problem 470
jones_supa writes "An EU citizen uses around 200 plastic bags per year. That's too much, says the EU. But wasting plastic bags is not just a European problem. Countries around the world are struggling with the issue, and it especially affects growing economies such as Asia. Some Southeast Asian countries don't even have the proper infrastructure in place to dispose of the bags properly. The problems for the environment are many. Plastic bags usually take several hundred years until they decay, thereby filling landfills, while animals often mistake the plastic for food and choke to death. Additionally they are a major cause of seaborne pollution, which is a serious hazard for marine life. This autumn, EU started ambitious plans which aim to reduce usage 80% by 2017. Some countries have already applied measures to slow plastic bag use: England has added a 5p charge to previously free bags, and in Ireland the government has already imposed a tax of 22 euro cents ($0.29) per plastic bag. The EU Environment Commissioner, Janez Potonik, said, 'We're taking action to solve a very serious and highly visible environmental problem.'"
The cost and use of plastic bags (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, so plastic bags in the grocery stores here in Finland have cost somewhere between 15-30 Euro cents for, well forever. I could get a proper cloth grocery bag to reuse, or buy paper bags instead, but I choose not to. Why? I use those plastic bags for my trash!
So if I did go cloth or, heaven forbid, paper, I'd still have to buy plastic bags to put in my trash cans. It doesn't matter if I buy them separately or on a roll, I'm going to keep buying those plastic bags until I come up with a better way to get rid of my trash.
Easy to ACTUALLY solve (Score:5, Interesting)
Waste is a massive problem. And it has a trivial solution. Mandate that all packaging be recyclable, and marked for recycling. If it's not marked for recycling, prohibit sale and require the packages to be destroyed or returned to the country of origin. Anything not recyclable must be compostable and clearly marked as such. Finally, all plastic bags must be rapidly UV-degrading and compostable, full stop. That outright solves the problem of plastic bag forests. You don't need to charge a premium, which does absolutely nothing to mitigate the problem of the bags which ARE thrown away, and only an idiot would believe that the majority of the population will take good care of plastic sacks because they cost them 5p a piece. Requiring a more expensive bag will have the effect of making the bags more expensive anyway; some retailers will roll the cost into the cost of their products, and some of them will charge the customer. Either way, the free market is completely capable of solving this problem with the proper guidance, which is NOT a fee.
Obligatory music track (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The cost and use of plastic bags (Score:5, Interesting)
A roll of specially-designed bin-liners costs the equivalent of about five Euro cents per bag here, and you can get them in biodegradable varieties. You're wasting your money by using shopping bags.
Re:Taxing is not going to fix the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, except I'm not going to use a bunch of fabric bags that have to buy myself, remember to bring to the store, and that have to be washed after every visit to the store. A much better and more practical idea would be a modest surcharge (5 cents/bag or whatever) which you then get back when you turn them in for recycling (which would be required in every store, not just at recycling centers). We already do this with plastic bottles in several states in the U.S. and, the way I see it, everybody wins.
Re:England (Score:5, Interesting)
What Sobey's did do right was start selling cheap reusable nylon and canvas bags, which they would replace if ever the bag was damaged. I paid around $12 for six bags and some how ended up with ten somewhere along the way. I've had three replaced over the last four years with no issues. People still use plastic bags, I get them every now and then to clean the cat box and for kitchen catchers, but I see a lot more people using the reusable bags instead.
Re:England (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone posted Tim Minchin's Canvas Bags [youtube.com] song below. I've added it into my current work music playlist - hopefully its catchy message will become etched into my brain, and somehow force me to change my habits :p
Re:England (Score:5, Interesting)
plastic bags in our seas? (Score:5, Interesting)
Five years ago I was on a beach outside Malaga, Spain, about to take a swim in the sea. Diving under water I suddenly saw hundreds of more or less colored plastic bags floating around at different depths, like jellyfish. The sea was apparently full with those, at least along the coastline, to a degree. Some sort of tide bringing these I guess. Needless to say, the swimming experience was not particularly appealing suddenly and was cut short. It was disgusting. I am not really sure how to fix this problem today, but a price tag on each bag and a penalty for disposing of trash in inappropriate locations in general seem like a start to me.
Re:Taking exception to a statement in the summary (Score:2, Interesting)
My wife is a research scientist specializing in additive packages for polyethylene. Raw polyethylene, particularly as film, degrades at a startling rate. Anti-oxidants and UV protectors are required to give the stuff a useful lifetime. When the additive package "runs out", the film disintegrates. "Remain for hundreds of years" is the purest of bullshit. The only place where that might be true is in a landfill, where that is *a desired property*. A landfill is *not* a compost heap, and the people who design them don't *want* the contents to degrade. Studies of landfill stability date the strata from newspaper headlines - paper from 50 years ago is expected to be easily readable.
Don't get me started on what's greenest - polyethylene, cloth or paper. People get their hate on because poly is a petrochemical, but they never bother to look at the big picture.
Re:This issue isn't so black and white (Score:5, Interesting)
> For one thing, it turns out that lots of people do "recycle" those "disposable" plastic bags. When
> Ireland introduced a tax on plastic bags, bin liner purchases increased by 400%.
Bingo! I mean I will admit, i throw away the occasional perfectly good bag but, we use them for all sorts of thing. we even have had a bin just for putting plastic bags in so they could be reused later. Who doesn't reuse them?
Need to carry something that has to be protected from rain? Plastic bag. Need a small trash bag to carry with you while cleaning up? Need a quick "glove" to pick up something nasty? Plastic bags. plastic bag. Or a trash bag...for the car.
Re:solution not taxation (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it just me that's struggling to see how a 'solution' is to charge people more for something they already use?
At least in the UK, the big supermarkets are already making quite a bit of progress*: they have racks of cheap re-usable bags prominently displayed by the till, sometimes with 'bag for life' free replacement deals, and give extra loyalty card points for customers who bring their own bags.
Charging for bags isn't going to make any significant financial impact on anybody, but the mere existence of a charge for something that was once free might be just enough to nudge people into changing their habits (remember to stuff the bags back into the car when you've finished unpacking - it's not a big deal). Having the charge mandated by government as a 'tax on bags' helps prevent any one company trying to get an advantage by offering free bags.
Maybe it will work better in UK/Europe, where displayed prices for consumer goods are always inclusive of tax and 'what you see is what you pay' compared with the US where consumers are used to sales tax and other random 'state surcharge evaluation fee assessment contribution' surcharges materialising at the checkout.
(* apart from the local Spar which was fairly recently re-fitted with a brilliant checkout design dependent on the plastic bag dispenser that completely fails if the shopper brings their own bag - it does mean they fit 6 checkouts in the space previously occupied by 3, which would be fine and dandy if they ever had more than 3 employees in the shop).
Re:England (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I tend to choose plastic bags at the supermarket because later I use them for garbage disposal. AFAIK, that's the norm (and very harmful to the environment, but garbage bags are plastic everywhere, aren't they?).
Re:Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Most Americans can't visualize it because of a 20th century invention called the "subdivision". That's where a property developer takes a large tract of land, builds a couple of hundred houses on it, with twisty streets so you can't see more than a couple of blocks away, and limits access to the main roads in one or two places (a specific variant called a pod subdivision), thus meaning most people have to go a mile or two through the maze just to get out of the subdivision.
All business development is along the main road. If you are lucky, a supermarket will build at that intersection. If you aren't lucky, the supermarket is a few miles down the main road, and you get a "convenience store", which is small and has a limited inventory for twice the price. If you are driving, it isn't too far, but you can't just cut across other people's yards when walking, because all the houses get a fenced-in back yard when they are built. In any case, the businesses get a fence between them and the houses to prevent, um, "unsavory persons" from having an easy way in and out, usually mandated by zoning laws*. The walk thus becomes far enough that it's not worth the bother, and you just get in the car to go those three to five miles. And your place of employment is going to be nowhere nearby, so it's not like it's along your way when you were already walking.
Europe, like older US cities, usually in the northeast, was built up long enough ago before this became common.
tl;dr: Most modern American neighborhoods are designed to be actively hostile to pedestrians trying to get anywhere.
*actually zoning [wikipedia.org] is probably the real cause of why subdivisions exist