British Prime Minister Theresa May has declared war on plastic waste. In a recent speech, Mrs May said she hoped to eliminate all avoidable plastic waste in Britain within 25 years. Her proposals include plastics-free aisles in supermarkets, where food would be sold loose, and a charge for plastic take-away food containers.
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Britain already has a five-pence charge on plastic bags sold at supermarkets; the Prime Minister said she wants to extend this charge to small shops, too.
Last year the Victorian government announced it would implement a similar ban on light-weight plastic bags after consulting "closely with businesses and the community on how best to implement the policy". The reason for the consultation? Because, the government said at the time, such bans often lead to an increase in the use of heavier plastic bags. The delay is a bit of a mystery: most other states and territories have already banned these bags – South Australia in 2009, and Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT soon after.
A review of the ACT ban in 2013 – two years after it came into force – found a 35 per cent reduction in plastic bags going into landfill. The review concluded that while Canberrans were still using heavy-duty bags, they were using them more than once.
Single-use plastic bags will be banned in Western Australia from July 1 this year, and the government there is already urging shoppers to start changing their habits.
There are plenty of good reasons why we shouldn't use plastic bags as freely as we do. By one estimate, Australians use 5 billion single-use bags a year (the number is probably higher); something like 50 million blow away into the environment, many ending up in the oceans and rivers, where they are ingested by birds and marine life.
On average we use a plastic bag for 12 minutes, only about 10 per cent are recycled in Australia, and they are made from fossil fuels. If we need an emblem of thoughtless consumerism, the single-use plastic bag is it.
There's no good reason we can't cut the use of these bags other than our habit of heading off to the supermarket without thinking to take an alternative. Woolworths and Coles are phasing them out in the states where they aren't already banned, and shoppers at Aldi, which doesn't give bags out, manage just fine.
Is it time the NSW government caught up with the rest of the country and banned the bags entirely?
