Wait for Us! Australia Wants to Ban Plastic Bags Too
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 01.14.08
Australia’s new Environment Minister, ex Midnight Oil singer, Peter Garrett has said he’d like to see the country rid of free plastic shopping bags by the end of the year. When this news broke last week the usual internet cry of ‘what am I going to do for free bin liners? went up. You’re going to have to buy them, is the short answer*. It's known as 'User Pays.' A great pillar of the much heralded modern free market.
That’s what happened in Ireland when they instituted their 15 cent PlasTax. Sales of bin liners did grow, but the volume of free bags dropped by some 90%. In the three months after the tax was introduced, shops handed out just over 23 million plastic bags - about 277 million fewer than normal, the Irish government said.
We’ve seen that China can ante up for a plastic bag ban by June this year and they use in one day what Australia would take nine months to get through!
4 billion bags are apparently given away annually by Australian retail stores, some of which in up in waterways, impeding stormwater drainage and more viscerally injuring marine life who get them wrapped around their bodies, or, thinking they are jelly fish, try to eat them.
The Australian Retailers Association has come out and said that consumers will be the ones who pay if the ban goes ahead. Shock! Does this mean supermarkets are currently giving shoppers the bags as outright gifts and not including the cost of buying the bags into their existing overheads? Hah. Via :: ABC
* PS. With aware shopping (bulking in bulk, reusable bags, minimal meat product, etc) a good municipal recycling scheme and an effective composting, wormfarm or bokashi bucket arrangement, most of what goes in your bin is likely to be dry waste (plastic packaging and so on) that probably doesn’t need a bin liner anyhow.
Following the introduction of the eco-contribution in Malta 2005, the cost of plastic bags went up to 16 euro cents. Therefore customers and shop owners started introducing other alternatives to the plastic shopping bags; such as bags made of cloth, degradable and bio-degradable bags, since they are not taxed.
It was estimated that at the time 50 million plastic bags were thrown away every year in Malta (population 400,000). nowadays this has been reduced to 22 million. ECO Taxation through the polluter pays principle works.
There are soo many arguments about plastic bags, paper bags and what to use for trash. In the end the less we use the better and that goes for far more than just bags. The key is to find something durable that really works for you and is convenient and easy to use. There are many great reusable bags now but my favorite is the flip and tumble bag because it just works in my life. That I think is the key.
Yeah I hope it goes through as it will force the hand in NZ to follow suit.
The retailers assoc. are playing the reusing them as bin liners argument (in a really bad way)
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4354751a13.html
In communist russia, we used to just put a bit of newspaper at the bottom, of that bin, when you tip out the rubish into the concequent recepticle the rubbish comes out pretty cleanly and as an added benefit, more rubbish fits into the abovementioned recepticle as the induvidual bagsdo not create large gaps between them that the bags stop from being filled, luce garbage is a lot more compact, thus saving a bit of space, handy if you pay for garbage disposal by volume.
The ironic thing here is that plastic bags are probably the most re-used forms of garbage there is.
Here’s what the ban on plastic bags means in real life: the average, bill-paying citizen will have to spend more time, money and energy carrying his/her groceries home while big oil companies continue to sell more oil than ever (in the form of gas) at whatever inflated price tickles their fancy.
Banning the use of plastic bags is an environmental red-herring. so what’s worse, throwing away oil in the form of plastic bags, or pouring oil into the atmosphere in the form of car exhaust? if there’s one thing oil is good for, it’s for making plastic.