How many plastic bags are used in Australia?20 million Australians are currently using around 5 billion plastic check-out bags every year.
Combine the number of bags we use every year with the time it takes for them to break down and you have a major environmental problem.
Where can I purchase a reusable bag for my shopping?You can buy reusable bags at all leading supermarkets.
You can purchase a long-lasting reusable 'Go Green' bag at Coles and Bi-Lo supermarkets for only $1. Ten cents from the sale of every Go Green bag provides support to environmental initiatives of Planet Ark, Clean Up Australia and Landcare Australia.
The benefits of reusable bags:
- Calico bags and Coles supermarket Go Green bags hold twice as many items as plastic bags.
- Reusable bags are easier to carry as they have comfortable handles and some can even go over your shoulder.
- Calico and polypropylene reusable bags will not burst under the weight of heavy shopping items such as tins or soft drinks.
- The plastic bags we don't use don't have to be produced, recycled or disposed of. Every plastic bag we don't use makes the world safer for wildlife.
You see the word "Calico" turn up a few times here but do you see any calico bags on sale? Actually, the bags on sale in Coles and Bi-Lo are polypropylene. Of course, the reusable bags (which are also plastic bags) require some production costs and will eventually be either disposed of or recycled (each of which incurs some additional cost).
In fact, closer inspection of the Planet Ark site actually says that the bags they have for sale are made of polypropylene, but only when you dig right down the bottom of their specifications page. This does seem just a little devious. Their whole campaign is based around telling people to say no to plastic bags, and here we have yet another plastic bag.
What are Planet Ark Reusable Bags made of?Planet Ark reusable bags, like the 'Green Bags' seen in Coles and Woolworths supermarkets, are made from non-woven polypropylene that is manufactured from polypropylene gas, a by-product of oil refining. These reusable bags usually have a solid removable base that is manufactured from nylon or PET.
Polypropylene bags can carry more shopping than plastic check-out bags, so shoppers use less. They are sturdy and designed to be reused repeatedly over many years. At the end of their lives, they can be recycled - drop them into the plastic check-out bag recycling bins at all Coles and Woolworths supermarkets.
There is a bit more misinformation here... The polypropylene bags are not all that sturdy, especially if you fill them up with lots of items (as the above suggests). I've been counting the re-use of a particular bag and after using it 10 times, the stitching is starting to come out around the corners. I also took the trouble to weigh both the common lightweight plastic bag and the new heavy polypropylene bag. My mass measurements would not be accurate enough to make a drug dealer happy but I measure the polypropylene bag as 15 times heavier than the lightweight plastic bag. That means you must use each heavyweight bag at least 15 times for every single use of a lightweight bag.
So how many times do I use a lightweight bag? Well, once for the shopping, then usually they get used for rubbish so most of them get used twice. However, they are also handy for bundling up cables because normally cables have a magic ability to tangle but when bundled in a plastic shopping bag they can't tangle. They are good for grouping together bigs of old junk that you want to pack away for a long time but you know you will need sometime and you can write on the bag with felt pen so you can find the stuff again. Shopping bags are also handy to put your lunch box into when you have leftovers for lunch and you are worried that the box might leak. Let's go with each lightweight bag getting used twice. That means the polypropylene bag must be used 30 times to break-even on the mass of plastic.
Howver... if your main secondary use is for bundling rubbish, it's hard to see how is is possible to achieve 30 uses out of a bag you don't want to throw out. That means you are going to need some other plastic bag for your rubbish and that rubbish bag is only going to get a single usage.
Planet Ark do address the bin-liner question as well:
By reducing plastic check-out bags isn't that just going to increase the sale of garbage bags as many people reuse their shopping bags as kitchen bin liners?A 90% reduction of plastic check-out bags has been achieved in Ireland when a $0.25c levy was introduced on all plastic shopping bags.
Some Irish stores have increased their sales of kitchen bin liners by up to 77%. If you look beyond the percentages the actual numerical figures illustrate the tremendous success of the Irish bag levy:
- A 90% reduction in plastic check-out bag usage resulted in an estimated 1.15 billion less plastic bags being given away at the checkout every year.
- The 77% increase in kitchen bin liner sales only increased the amount sold by an estimated maximum of 70 million plastic bags.
Therefore there is an overall reduction in plastic bag usage of over 1.08 billion plastic bags.
If the same situation was replicated in Australia i.e. a 90% decrease in plastic bag usage and a 77% increase in kitchen tidy bag sales, this would reduce the amount of plastic bags used in Australia every year by over 5 billion.
These are reasonable figures but they have a number of major limitations:
Maybe there is still an overall benefit towards the polypropylene bags, but if there is, it wouldn't come to much.
What is more annoying is that so many other "Green" groups have gotten onto the campaign and are adding their own levels of confusion onto the issue:
DECLINE PLASTIC BAGSEvery person in the UK uses up to 134 plastic bags a year, which is more than eight billion altogether. "They're all sitting in huge landfill sites producing tons of methane gas and take around 500 years to decay," says Eugenie Harvey, the director of the fashionable green movement We Are What We Do and the person behind the book Change the World for a Fiver. "There is an alternative - it's called a shopping bag. Failing that, you could start by using fewer bags at the checkout, or, even better, taking old bags with you to the shops. One thing is certain: with very little effort, we could use fewer than 134 bags a year."
Eugenie Harvey may be fashionable but he doesn't know much about landfill... it is the biological mass that produces the methane and the plastic produces negligible gas precisely because its breakdown is so slow. Buying plastic bin liners would not make the situation any better and using paper bags would increase the amount of gas generated by the landfill.
The ABC does a good job at promoting science, interestingly their show on plastic bags had some inexplicable comments as well:
Once let loose into the environment, plastic bags can cause considerable harm, blocking drains and suffocating wildlife mistaking the bag for food.
Most of the bags in the landfill picture are not actually shopping bags (unless a lot of people get large black shopping bags). These are what I would call "garbage bags", I believe that they are made from high density polyethylene (same as the lightweight shopping bags).
One thing they should not be used for is lining garbage bins. It doesn't matter if you put them straight in your bin as waste or put your other garbage in them, the plastic bags will still end up in landfill, and potentially at large in the environment.
This is effectively saying that all HDPE bags must be recycled, because there is no safe disposal mechanism -- this would include garbage bags! With no safe disposal mechanism for garbage bags, the campaign has a much more pressing issue of what people are going to use to put their garbage into. Why attack shopping bags when garbage bags are just as much of a problem?
Planet Ark's tips for shoppers
3. Reuse plastic bags you have accumulated as garbage liners
Planet Ark seems to disagree with the ABC on this one.
On the other hand, the ABC do make an important point... landfill is not the real issue; the real issue is that plastic is a serious problem in waterways and in the ocean. As we can see from the stomach contents of the turtle, even one plastic bag can do a lot of damage once it gets loose in the ocean. However, the bag in the turtle doesn't look like a typical supermarket shopping bag. It looks more like some sort of novelty bag or perhaps brightly coloured wrapping for some product.
Here, we stumble across a deeper problem... the turtle can be hurt by a lunch wrapper, or a sandwich bag, or the clear plastc wrap from around a packet of cigarettes, or a freezer bag, or an empty bag of potato crisps, or the clear plastic from around a bunch of flowers.
There was a baloon in the turtle stomach as well, if we want to save the turtles we are going to have to ban baloons too. How many times have we seen a young child with a balloon full of helium and looked up as the child lets the balloon go and it gets smaller into the sky while to child is busy asking parents for another one? That balloon comes down somewhere...
While we are at it, we are going to have to ban condoms, rubber gloves, cling wrap, clear plastic party drink cups, and just about anything else that might end up in the waterways and might be eaten by a turtle. This is looking like the thin end of a very large wedge. If we really are going to replace all these things then we are going to need to think hard about replacements. Plastic wrap (in a huge number of different forms) is excellent for sealing consumable products to protect them from their environment and delivering a secure and reliable product from manufacturer to consumer. Have the Green groups suggested a viable replacement?
This makes me wonder why do Green groups make such a big deal of the landfill issue when the water issue is more important? Bags can sit under piles of landfill without causing any serious problem -- all sorts of other junk (both plastic and otherwise) goes into landfill. If you really want to worry about landfill, worry about the NiCad batteries that people throw in the rubbish because those release toxic Cadmium which has the potential to get into soil and underground water and which will never break down. Then there is Lead from electronic equipment and from lead-acid car batteries, and the smaller lead-acid batteries that go into telephone equipment, not to mention Mercury from watch batteries. Plastic bags are the least of your problems when it comes to landfill.
It strikes me that the whole plastic shopping bag campaign can only be explained by saying that the deeper issues were too hard and it was something visible enough to be trendy, minor enough that it wasn't rejected outright by the powers that be, and which might just have some small environmental benefit (or at least, it probably doesn't make things much worse). It seems sort of an achievement if you talk quickly and have a good wind blowing behind you.
However, I posit that this sort of half-arsed "pretend cause" is a backward step for the Green movement. Greenies have enough of a reputation for being space cadets at the moment and the main thrust of the "say no to plastic bags" campaign is going to rapidly turn into backlash when people realise that the propaganda that they have been fed consists of half-truths and ill-considered arguments. The Green movement are going to have to be ultra-careful to be honest at every step of the game or else leave themselves open to being considered shysters or idiots.
The fact is that Green issues are hard. The Capitalist system can already handle obvious problems with easy solutions, it can't handle insidious subtle problems with long term solutions... and there's a good reason for that, because the Capitalist system depends on ordinary people to make a judgement in their own personal self-interest and such people are more concerned with their short-term wellbeing than the overall long-term wellbeing of an ill defined group of future people. Environmental problems (like engineering problems) usually involve balanced trade-offs and difficult calculations that are beyond common education levels at the moment.
For example, is the "Greenhouse Effect" going to cause more rainfall or less? It will no doubt end up being good for some and bad for others but who will end up on which side of the line? Global climate is well known for its unpredictability and no one really knows the answer to that question. The conventional Greenie wisdom is that global warming must be stopped at all cost and the only safe thing we can do is to restore the earth to the way it was in an earlier age. That at least is one course of action that would have a chance at a predictable outcome, it is also a completely hopeless suggestion that is doomed to failure.
Seeing how global warming has been an ongoing process since man first discovered fire (which has already averted what should have been an ice-age) and seeing how the world population is growing at an ever increasing rate... it shouldn't be hard to see that returning the earth to any previous state requires the killing of a large number of people.
This is all happening at a time when less and less people are trusting Science and Engineering. People know that Science works, but they also know that Scientists are people who get paid a salary and produce the results that they are told to produce. Increasing numbers of people figure that if you can't trust Science then turning to ignorance (in various forms) must be the answer. This is horrible because the very opposite is the only way forward... every single person must become a scientist so that they can make sensible decisions for themselves and contribute meaningfully to the answer. It's a lot of hard work, more than what most people are willing to attempt, but that is the only way forward.
Here's part of a speech from the Australia Institute that is discussing the low uptake of "Green Energy" which is where Australians can offer to pay more for their electricity and support renewable energy sources. Needless to say, most people don't want to pay more, especially when their neighbours are getting the benefits without paying their share (a classic Tradgedy of the Commons).
Australians aren't stupid. Many of them recognise that their water saving or electricity saving strategies have virtually no impact on the big picture. And they want a system that is fair: even the most responsible citizens would be reluctant to pay their taxes if there were no obligation on everyone else to pay theirs. Just because they will not participate in tokenism doesn't mean that they wouldn't support visionary leadership. They know that some problems demand collective solutions.I think we must now concede that there are very distinct limits to the appeal to green guilt as the path to sustainability. In fact we are beginning to see an anti-environment backlash from people tired of having guilt trips laid on them. The other day I saw a Range Rover in Sydney's eastern suburbs with a bumper sticker that read: 'Doing my bit for greenhouse',not everyone feels guilty. I suspect that soon it will be cool in some social groups to say 'screw the environment', and sticking it up greenies will become a sport.
A new approach to Green political campaigning is going to be required and it is going to have to be long and slow and relentless, just like the problems we are facing. It is also going to have to sit down seriously and tackle the real issues, not pin its hat on amusing sidelines. At the very least it is going to have to present to people what the real issues are, without exaggeration and without distraction and without offering pretend solutions.
In the museum at Lord Howe Island is a display concerning plastic and its effect on wildlife. In particular muttonbirds, and shearwaters. Both species of birds tend to pick up small pieces of plastic and feed them to their chicks (with obviously negative consequences). Anyhow, I took a few photos of part of the exhibit and stuck them here (hope no one minds).
Note the plastic items causing the damage are small, colourful bit and pieces.
What I noticed was that although everyone is happy to come down hard on plastic bags, it usually is other plastic items that cause the damage, particularly small items such as bottle-tops and broken pieces off everyday plastic items. What that means is, if we want to make a difference we are going to have to crack down on all plastic items. We need a type of plastic that breaks down in about the expected lifespan of a common plastic item -- that is the only feasible answer I can think of because if the Green movement really wants to remove all plastic items from circulation then the chance of that happening is, ummmm, zero. No chance at all.
More small plastic bits, collected from the local area.
Yet again, Green concerns are not an easy matter, not even easy to understand let alone easy to solve. We have a lot of work to do at the fundamental level (like establishing a widespread concept of the "common good" and then figuring out how to make people take it seriously).
They have promised to fix the education system, hasn't happened yet, fingers crossed.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.