I generally write these blog articles and schedule them well in advance. Experience has taught me this is a necessary activity – I aim to publish one of these things per week and having a few articles already scheduled helps to avert deadline pressure, which I experienced in spades when I wrote my student humour column during my last year of university.
It’s a good system, but it does have its down sides in that the article once published may be well out of date. I had this experience recently, where I wrote a system for reducing secondary bag use and scheduled it for a few Sundays ahead.
The result being that the article was published shortly after Jacinda made her announcement that she was banning plastic bags.
But the idea of a ban is not a good idea in principle. As has already been widely established, there are very few environmentally effective alternatives to single use plastic bags, and it seems likely to me that banning them outright will lead to a switch to some short term alternatives that are less eco-efficient than the default option.
Not to mention that the real problem lies in the secondary uses that we apply to our plastic bags. Just because we ban single use plastic bags, does not mean that we will reduce the amount of rubbish we throw in the bin; rubbish that is often so sloppy that it needs to be pre-packaged before it can be taken out to the household rubbish container.
When I think of this problem, I think of how my elderly mother would solve it. She is a woman who is disinclined to get her hands dirty. While education in composting has gone some way to helping her understand how to reduce her waste flow, she is still heavily reliant on plastic bags to transport garbage from one receptacle to another.
It is difficult to predict how she would move waste around without plastic bags. Would she keep the rather large household rubbish bin, with its voluminous black sack, inside the house? It seems unlikely. The smell alone would put her off.
Furthermore, would she use the large household bin as the /only rubbish collection point in her home? Definitely not. More likely, then, that she would buy plastic bags on the black market.
As for purchasing a reusable bag for shopping, that is great, but she has bought many such bags already. Her regular purchases of these bags tend to fill the house, and yet she keeps buying them, driven by the environmental motive that makes her feel she is doing a good thing. But these bags do not solve the problem of moving small quantities of waste around her home. And if they did, it would be a very bad thing; it has already been established that reusables require 170 times more input than plastic bags. That is to say that a reusable must be used every week for 3.4 years to pay off the environmental facility it has drawn down on. If she stocks up on one reusable per week, driven by a mixture of innocence and forgetfulness, what will be the net effect for the environment?
And then there is the question of whether an outright ban is ever the right way to go about things. Remember that a ban needs to be enforced. I am not quite sure what the consequences would be for my mother if she were caught red handed dealing in plastic bags. I suppose I would need to read the legislation.
Although I am not in favour of the ban, nor am I particularly against it; I am simply warning of some potential downstream effects. It may be that a ban reverses household habits in such a way that they change more rapidly than they would have changed otherwise. Perhaps it will even lead to a golden age of composting.
But the real problem has not been identified. The real problem is the secondary use of household plastic bags. If households are banned from transporting these small compartments of waste using cost-effective means, then they must look at options to transport them using more expensive ones.
