article on plastic bag ban
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We try to do our bit. Our household has an overflowing cupboard of reusable shopping bags, and sometimes they make it to the car. We have bought those (ludicrously expensive) beeswax food wraps to replace cling wrap. We put newspaper at the bottom of the kitchen bin, and tip it all into the wheelie bin. Look! No bin liners!
We are far from perfect (I bought a takeaway coffee in a disposable cup the other day – the guilt!), but once you start, you see plastic everywhere. The use of plastic has been widespread since the 1950s and it is a wonderful product. But its ubiquity, especially single-use plastic, has a high price: the litter of shopping bags, takeaway containers, plastic bottles and straws. We pay millions to clean it up, and our oceans have become a plastic tip.
When you start thinking about plastic, you start thinking about waste, about a culture that has emerged only in the last couple of generations: tossing out food every week (which would have horrified my grandmother), the business of fast turnover clothes destined for landfill, how it’s cheaper to buy something new than repair. You see single-use plastic everywhere: a sole cucumber enclosed in plastic, a cupcake served in a stiff plastic container, recycled toilet paper packaged in plastic.
According to News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt (on whose Sky News show, the Bolt Report, I appear regularly), I am a deluded fool. Woolworths banned single-use plastic shopping bags a week ago, and Coles and IGA will do the same from 1 July. That’s more than 5bn bags a year to be phased out – bags that have to go somewhere, as they can take hundreds of years to decompose.
All states except NSW and Victoria have banned these flimsy things, and Victoria has announced it will do by the end of next year.
Bolt says it’s “an essentially useless gesture” that won’t help the environment. But he goes further. “What makes this ban even crazier is that it could actually kill some customers.”
I don’t especially want to be responsible for killing people, so let’s look at that claim. San Francisco became the first American city to ban single-use shopping bags in 2007. A few years later, two legal academics, Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright, looked at emergency room data and found that food-borne illnesses in San Francisco increased 46% after the bag ban went into effect. Most likely, they said, this was because people were putting food into dirty reusable bags. “Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths.”
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