Death of the plastic bag?

2018-08-01

By Anthony Pyle, Greens candidate for recent Darling Range By-election and Co-editor GI

The plastic bag ban has already begun, yet there’ll still be just as much plastic in our society.

The biggest barrier we will see with the bag ban is that we’ve moved from a free to play model of pollution to asking people to pay to pollute. I believe that the efforts made by supermarkets have been wildly unhelpful and have mostly put the expectation completely on the customer. In the last few weeks I haven’t even seen any of the major supermarket chains selling canvas bags. So how can a customer start making an informed, ecofriendly choice; especially if canvas bags only go on sale once the ban is enforced.

Let’s start by breaking this down into stages. First, we have our relationship with plastic. Plastic bags have been in our society for such a small amount of time. Cars and planes even predate plastic bags. Why is an invention that started popping up in the 1950’s in America so hard to let go of?

We only need to look at the options already given to suggest why we like plastic so much. To start with its been free for a long time and even when it’s not free, it’s affordable. Aldi has for years had thicker plastic bags for sale and people pay out of their sheer forgetfulness that Aldi don’t have single use plastic; although I’d imagine the thicker reusable bags they sell still only get one use.

The alternative of thicker reusable plastics will still fall foul of human laziness and we’re going to see a lot more of these thicker bags in our environment. If you thought single use plastics were bad, then these thicker reusable bags are devastating.

The only true alternative is to remove all plastic from our shopping, which will be hard when we’ve had such a love affair with the 9.7 billion plastic bags we use every year.

What are the corporations doing to ease customers over? The real answer is basically nothing. Woolworths tried to roll out the scheme early; followed by them going back to single use plastic bags as we watched society crumble over their new plastic-less overlords. If a week of no plastic bags has caused such chaos in one retailer, this won’t be a smooth transition.

We should really be talking about convenience of plastic and the online factor though. In recent years a lot of people have taken up ordering their groceries online; myself included.

Online Woolworths have taken to charging the customer a premium if they want to have the shopping without plastic bags and to be unpacked on their counter. Alternatively, you can pay a third of that premium and continue with your plastic existence. While on the other hand Coles isn’t really doing much better. They’ll offer you their branded “Better Bags” for 15c a bag with their online deliveries.

Both online services do suggest you can return them to your driver and I’d imagine a credit system to your account for bags returned would be in place. Although, I struggle to believe you’d get the same bags again. So, would the bags you return just go to landfill and so we let the cycle continue? The only saving grace for Coles is unlike their direct competitor they wont charge you a service fee to take it to your kitchen bench if you choose to go bagless.

But this is more about plastic than just a ban on single use plastics. In my last online order from Woolworths we saw the same amount of wasteful plastic. The new reusable bags are marginally thicker than the banned ones and they just aren’t up to their name. Even with this change in our supermarkets forced more by legislation than conscience, I’m seeing the same problems as before. We are still having packaged produce put into an extra plastic bag on delivery, as if the plastic it already came in wasn’t enough. Woolworths on their website even state they care about the environment:
“To help reduce our impact on the environment, we made a commitment to remove more than 3.2 billion single-use plastic bags from our stores.”
Yet Greens plastic ban poster I’m not seeing a discernable change, even less so now they’ve halted the bagless rollout because it was hurting their bottom line.

The only real solution to addressing plastic bags is community engagement. We should encourage local businesses and the major supermarkets to provide benefits for using reusables. A great example of this is Keep Cups for cafes which often leads to a discount on your coffee for not using a disposable cup. Would we be able to see a discount on produce from the deli if we brought our own containers? Surely remembering the canvas bag for the shopping would be worthwhile if the plastic was just so expensive we wouldn’t want it.

So, let’s find the equivalent to the Keep Cup for groceries and start a social revolution towards the death of the plastic bag.