Australia's battle to bag the plastic goes on

Peter Garrett's promise has failed but the fight is not over, writes Rick Feneley.
The Sydney Morning Herald 26 Dec 08;

A plastic bag dances skittishly on the wind in the defining scene of the film American Beauty. It inhales, glides and pirouettes, then exhales and fades as if to die, but draws breath and takes flight again - over and over. It is a mesmerising metaphor for our human frailty but also for our will to live, for our craving to dance on, to find some meaning, some beauty. So we cheer for that little plastic bag.

Australians, it seems, will continue to cheer the plastic bag. Billions of them, in fact.

It is barely a year since the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, made the rather inflated pronouncement that Australia would ban the plastic shopping bag by the end of this year.

Guess what? It is the end of 2008. And the federation of Australia is doing nothing of the sort.

When it came to the crunch, in April and again in November, the states could not agree on how to wean the nation off this addiction: about 4 billion plastic bags a year. Most end up in landfill. Some masquerade as jellyfish and cause marine predators choke and die.

In five days, the South Australian Government - fed up with waiting for the rest of Australia and determined to hold its "head high" - will take unilateral action and ban the thin, lightweight, polyethylene shopping bag.

Overseas, China announced a ban in June and Los Angeles City Council will ban plastic shopping bags from July 2010. There, shoppers will have to pay 25 US cents (36 cents) for a paper or biodegradable bag.

Back home, more customers of Bunnings, Ikea, Officeworks and Aldi carry reusable bags because these retailers have charged 10 to 15 cents for every plastic bag. So successful was the charge at Bunnings and Ikea that they now carry no plastic bags, joining McDonald's.

At least three NSW towns - Kangaroo Valley, Huskisson and Mogo - have imposed voluntary bans for four or five years and say they have suffered no inconvenience or backlash. Ballina Shire Council may soon follow.

From January 1, South Australia will start banning retailers from giving away single-use plastic bags, although they will have four months to comply, after which they will face on-the-spot fines.

Compostable, biodegradable plastic bags will be allowed, but retailers will most likely have to charge for them to absorb the cost. Target will charge 10 cents a bag.

When Victoria conducted a four-week trial of a 10-cent charge at 16 supermarkets this year, it cut plastic bag use by 79 per cent. Within weeks of Ireland imposing a plastic bag tax in 2002, it boasted a 94 per cent drop in plastic bag use.

In November, Victoria failed to win national support for a bag levy. Only the three smallest players - Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory - agreed to a joint approach, so this group will develop yet another proposal to take to all Australian state and territory ministers in April.

"It was a failure of political leadership," says Jon Dee, national chairman of the Do Something campaign and a co-founder of Planet Ark. "If they can't do anything about plastic bags, how will they ever address climate change?"

It was in March 2004 that the then NSW premier, Bob Carr, said he would force supermarkets to charge for plastic bags or ban them. The federal Labor leader of the day, Mark Latham, made similar commitments.

But after a meeting of state and federal ministers in April this year, it was Peter Garrett who baulked at a national levy on bags because he did not want to impose burden on families already struggling with rising living costs. Dee wonders about this. Aldi supermarkets, a big attraction for low-income families, have always charged for plastic bags.

The office of the NSW Environment Minister, Carmel Tebbutt, says the State Government prefers a "national approach", although it will watch what happens in South Australia. NSW wants more research on biodegradable plastic bags.

The Productivity Commission urged the Federal Government to abandon its ambition to eliminate plastic bags by the end of this year, saying it could not be justified on a cost-benefit basis. It reported that plastic bags accounted for less than 2 per cent of landfill, only 0.8 per cent of the bags became litter and that these accounted for just 2 per cent of all litter items (by number). The commission acknowledged some risks for wildlife but said these had been overstated.

This month, an endangered hawksbill turtle was put down after it swallowed plastic and was found sick on a beach at Tomakin, south of Batemans Bay. And when Wighty the crocodile died after its capture off Magnetic Island last month, wildlife authorities found it had ingested 25 plastic shopping and garbage bags, a plastic wine cooler bag and a rubber float. They prevented Wighty digesting his food so he died of starvation.

And yet, perhaps it is the plastic bag that will become the endangered species.

Last year, Australians used 3.9 billion thin plastic bags. In 2002, it was 5.9 billion, although bag use rose 650 million in 2006-07, which Dee says confirms that the retail industry's self-regulation is not working.

About 250,000 of that overall reduction might be thanks to the small NSW South Coast town of Mogo. Coles Bay in Tasmania, a small town on the whale migration route, was the first Australian town to ban plastic bags five years ago. It has used 1.75 million fewer bags since then and is the inspiration for a ban in Modbury, Devon, hailed by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

At the Kangaroo Valley general store, they pack groceries in paper bags, for which they impose no charge.

"People come in and say, 'Oh, wow, you see these in the movies,' " the shop's co-owner, Andrea Neill, says. No one is ever stroppy to be told plastic is not an option, she says.

But are paper bags any better than plastic? Much has been written about the energy and water required to make a paper bag being far greater than that for its plastic competitor. Dee argues this ignores the long-term environmental effect of plastic, its failure to break down for as long as 1000 years, and that billions of the bags are imported to Australia from China, consuming more energy.

He says it also ignores that paper is a biodegradable, renewable, recyclable resource, and it takes no account of the trouble that a single plastic bag can create when it contaminates a recycle bin. It can shut down machinery at a recycling plant and be a nightmare for sorting staff to untangle. Only about 5 per cent of Australia's plastic bags are recycled, despite recycling bins in supermarkets.

At Bangalow, in northern NSW, women have joined almost 700 morsbags groups worldwide, which work in sewing bees to make reusable shopping bags from second-hand fabrics: old sheets, curtains, whatever. They give the bags to shoppers free.

But South Australia will be the real test case. It expects its ban could result in 400 million fewer plastic bags - or 1600 tonnes of plastic - becoming litter or landfill every year.

In the land of the Tidy Town, will South Australia be crowned the Tidy State? If there is ever an Australian Beauty, might it be shot in South Australia - without a plastic bag? Or, perhaps, a biodegradable, compostable plastic bag?