By Paul Leavoy
What product is available at virtually every retailer across the continent at the same price?
Well, it’s not gum or chocolate or even lottery tickets. It’s far more widespread than any of those.
It’s a plastic bag. The cost? Nothing.
Plastic bags became a widespread item of convenience about 30 years ago when retail behemoths like Sears and J. C. Penny switched to merchandise bags to hold items. In 1977, the bags were embraced by supermarket chains far and wide and quickly eclipsed paper as the bag of choice.
Most of the first plastic bags are still around, in landfills, oceans, trees and elsewhere. Scientists have yet to pinpoint the exact lifetime of the polyethylene product, but estimates hover between 100 and, oh, maybe a million years.
Most Canadian retail chains currently offer customers plastic bags exclusively.
For years, however, the paper vs. plastic debate raged on, and still persists in the U.S. where four out of every five bags used are plastic.
The debate itself has become irrelevant and it is now accepted that plastic is the worse of the two.
Plastic opponents argue that a given mass of plastic occupies much greater volume than the same mass in paper, but paper does biodegrade and is readily recyclable.
Plastic bags are easily recycled in Canada. You can pack a bunch in another bag, tie it up and chuck it in the blue box for pickup next week. But they’re without this luxury in the U.S. Consumers are asked to return their bags to the grocery store for reuse, and it’s difficult to measure how many actually do this.
But here, it’s also difficult to gauge how many people actively recycle plastic bags. Environmental institutions don’t have our national stats of consumption and distribution figured out, but to put things in perspective, consider Ireland.
In the spring, the Irish government introduced a ‘bag tax’ to reduce the one billion or so plastic bags handed out each year. On average, that’s about 200 bags per person per year.
The tax added an additional nine pence (about 22 Canadian cents) for each bag used in a grocery or other store.
It’s generally hard to measure the success of this type of initiative, but no one can argue with a 90 per cent decrease in usage over an eight month span. The results were so outstanding that Australia has begun to follow suit with private members bills and a national plastic bag levy campaign.
The UK is considering adopting a similar scheme to cut down the estimated 10 billion bags handed out yearly at supermarkets alone.
There is some resistance, but it is clear to chains and governments alike that voluntary measures (i.e. asking people to reuse their bags) just don’t work. And the Ireland example is proving that the tax is something people can easily circumvent with a simple lifestyle change.
We should consider something similar – perhaps a slight departure from the Irish model, where funds are collected from chains and directed into a conservation fund. If there is any public opposition to the tax, why not give the consumer the option to bring the bags back to the grocery store for a return? That way it would function more like a deposit, and no one would be inconvenienced by the levy.
This initiative could be coupled with a recent development by UK-based Symphony Plastics. They have created what they call SPITEK plastic, a material with the same mechanical properties and processing characteristics as polyethylene, but with an agent that catalyzes the degradation process. That is, you can throw SPITEK bags in with the compost or even leave it in the back of a closet only to find a gooey residue within six months.
Conceivably, the bags that people do decide to purchase could be SPITEK bags, virtually gone within months of distribution.
But in the meantime, if you’re hell-bent on throwing away your plastic bags, consider tying them in a knot before disposal. The parachuting effect renders loose bags transient, allowing them to travel miles to fences, city streets, coral reefs and the mouths of sea turtles.
Sounds silly, but without intervention it’s one of those problems that just doesn’t go away. Or may, perhaps, in 100 to a million years.