(Free petrochemicals with every purchase)
Municipal World: March 2009
“Would you like a plastic bag for that?” asks the cashier at my local video store. “No,” I answer, and then feeling suddenly bold, “Does anyone really take a plastic bag for a DVD?” After all (I think to myself) a DVD is itself made of plastic, and then encased in a hard plastic shell that fits easily into a coat pocket.
“Yes,” she instructs me pedantically, “some people need them for their pets and,” she adds, “some people just like them.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
As I turn down my street (just below the plastic bag that has been fluttering from a tree branch for months) I reflect that putting animal excrement in a plastic bag that will endure for 1,000 years is a fitting tribute to a loved pet. And pleasing people with an affection for plastic bags is equally commendable. On the other hand, I reckon that the eight billion plastic bags that Canadians use each year is somewhat excessive to achieve these limited objectives.
There’s no doubt that plastic bags have impressive qualities: lightweight, waterproof, strong, inexpensive, and durable. Polyethylene, the material used for most plastic shopping bags, is made from ethylene, itself a by-product of oil (naptha) or natural gas. Polyethylene was invented in the 1930s although when I worked as a grocery clerk in Windsor in 1977 we still handed out sturdy paper bags — but the plastic bag explosion was about to begin.
Today, plastic bags are everywhere, not just in the hands of shoppers. They lap up against the banks of canals in Venice, litter jungle paths in Guatemala, swirl in the wind along the ramparts of the royal cities of Fez and Marrakesh, and get stuck in the gullets of thousands of marine animals.
The Challenge
The Canadian Plastics Industry Association says, “It is hard to think of a world without [plastic bags].”
But “how hard?” I wondered. Three years ago I decided to find out.
My first step was to figure out how to carry my groceries home in something other than a plastic bag (or a paper bag, for that matter). I experimented with various receptacles including my coat pockets, briefcase, knapsack, and even my baseball cap. The knapsack proved most effective, sometimes in combination with a satchel or reusable bag.
One challenge was dealing with plastic bag-dispensing zombies that sometimes moonlight as store cashiers. They had to be reminded repeatedly that, “I REALLY DO NOT WANT A BAG”.
The initial phase of cutting out shopping bags was so successful, however, that I decided to also eliminate the clear plastic bags used for fruit and vegetables. At first I simply re-used these bags until I discovered re-usable mesh bags.
Some catching up
Since I began changing my world, the broader world has started changing ever so slightly as well. Today, almost all major grocery stores put some effort into curtailing the number of plastic bags they hand out – in Ontario likely motivated by a voluntary agreement with the provincial government to achieve a 50% reduction by 2012.
For starters, most grocery stores now sell reusable bags made from materials like cloth, nylon, or recycled plastic. Celina Fiacco, communications director at one of Canada’s biggest grocery conglomerates says they have sold two million reusable bags, although she can’t say what impact this has had on reducing the number of plastic bags they give out.
Some stores collect used plastic bags for recycling — often in bins hidden in a corner. In the U.S. about 1% of all plastic bags (compared to 20% for paper bags) actually get recycled, according to the US EPA. The Canadian Plastics Industry suggests the plastic recycling numbers are higher here. The economics of plastic bag recycling aren’t attractive enough to involve the industry directly, so it encourages municipalities to take on the task. Low weight, low value, and problems of contamination are obstacles to more recycling.
Few stores have tampered with the typical dynamic that sees consumers getting a free bit of petrochemicals (in the form of a plastic bag) with every purchase. Until recently, only a few discount grocery retailers made you ask for a plastic bag -– and pay five cents for the privilege.
Peter Hilge, team leader at a U.S. –based natural and organic food chain with a popular downtown Toronto outlet, is proud of his store’s recent decision to become fully plastic shopping bag-free. Unfortunately, his store has simply replaced a bad plastic habit with a bad, perhaps worse, paper habit. As I watch the number of fancy paper bags being handed out at checkout counters I can practically hear chain saws buzzing and birds fleeing.
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Another well-known natural food co-op on Toronto’s east side has taken a more measured, thoughtful approach. Indeed, Patrick Conner, a co-owner explains that the store has accepted used plastic bags for recycling (until the volume became overwhelming), sold reusable plastic crates that can be easily stacked and stored in a car trunk, promoted canvas bags, recently introduced washable mesh bags for produce, and now provides “100% degradable” (made-in-China) bags. Conner tells me that the store will shortly be switching to bags made from non-GMO corn. At a cost of 25 cents each these bags will, however, be more than three times as expensive as the current ‘degradable’ version.
Bags and their environmental baggage
No shopping bag arrives in the hands of a consumer with its innocence intact. Whether the bag is plastic, paper, or something else, there is a history. For plastic bags, oil or natural gas must be extracted, transported to refineries, transformed into plastic film and plastic bags, delivered to stores, and ultimately collected and disposed of. Paper bags follow a similar route, except that renewable resources in the form of trees (a.k.a. forests and wildlife habitat) are extracted and converted to pulp, a process that requires large amounts of water. In each case, at each step of the way energy is needed. Consuming this energy (for extraction, transportation, processing or refining, and manufacturing) creates air and water pollutants and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
According to the US EPA it takes far more energy to make paper bags than plastic ones. Paper bags are also far heavier than plastic ones, which means more trucks (and fuel) are needed to ship them. It takes four times more energy to recycle paper than plastic. Paper bags decompose causing GHG emissions — although our landfill sites are generally air- and water-tight, so that the process can take many decades. A paper bag will take up more room in a landfill (but never choke a dolphin if it ends up in the ocean).
‘Degradable’ and compostable bags bring their own related baggage, and a slightly different ending. Degradable plastic bags break down into constituent parts including plastic polymers that have a distinct set of problems. Compostable bags will fully decompose, but only given the right conditions, such as in your backyard composter or city composting facility. There is also the important issue of diverting land from feeding people to feeding bad habits.
A recent comprehensive study for the government of Australia concluded that the best alternative to throwaway shopping bags, from a resource-use and GHG point of view, is the solid plastic crate or reusable bag made from plastic. Cloth bags were rated a little lower because of pesticide use and farm emissions in cotton production. The study noted that it takes .48 megajoules of energy to make a 6-gram plastic bag – or the equivalent in energy use of driving about 100 metres in the average car.
Solutions from around the world
Patrick Conner concludes that, “we need to decide as a society what is the value of plastic bags”.
According to the Irish government, the value of a plastic bag is 35 cents (Cdn). In 2002 Ireland was the first country to impose a levy on plastic bags. The result was a 90% reduction annually in the 1.2 billion bags being used. (Plastic bags used for meat and poultry, among other goods, were exempted.) A main goal of the levy was to reduce litter although 110 million Euros have been raised to fund environmental programs. The levy has also “been invaluable as an awareness raising initiative and in influencing behavioural change by consumers,” says Eddie Kiernan, private secretary to Ireland’s environment minister.
Toronto City Council recently decided to require all retailers to charge a modest five-cent fee for each plastic shopping bag handed out. The charge, which will be pocketed by retailers, takes effect June 1, 2009. One major grocery retailer jumped the queue to take some green credit for the change by deciding to collect the 5-cent fee earlier, in January 2009 in Toronto (April in the rest of the country), and handing over some of the loot to a non-profit group. Toronto now also accepts plastic shopping bags in its recycling program.
The City of Seattle was about to implement a 20-cent levy on every plastic and paper shopping bag until the American Chemistry Council stepped in to help halt the initiative with an expensive signature-gathering exercise. Enough signatures were gathered to require a local referendum, to be held next year. The City had estimated that the initiative would result in 184 million fewer bags being manufactured each year and a cut to GHG emissions of about 112,000 tons (from reduced energy use) over the next 30 years. In announcing the levy, Seattle’s mayor said, “The answer to the question ‘paper or plastic’ is neither – both harm the environment. Every piece of plastic ever made is still with us. The best way to handle a ton of waste is not to create it.”
Other places like China, Bangladesh (where bags blocking storm-water drains exacerbated flooding events), San Francisco, Modbury, England, and Canada’s own Leaf Rapids, Manitoba and Iqaluit, Nunavut have simply banned, or are about to ban, the distribution of free plastic shopping bags.
Some numbers
Cathy Cirko, a director of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association, isn’t willing to agree that the number of plastic bags used in Canada is excessive. Instead she focuses on how much less energy and landfill space are needed for plastic compared to paper bags. Indeed, Cirko suggests the Irish tax failed because there was a big increase in sales of garbage pail liners along with a 21% increase in the amount of plastic consumed (by weight) for bags, especially for garbage bin liners. These numbers are, however, misleading.
The 90% decrease in plastic shopping bags amounted to over one billion bags, while the high percentage increase in garbage pail liners amounted to only 70 million bags. Also the increase in overall plastic consumption by weight was based on a change in (imported) plastic comparing 2004 to 2005. It would have been far more meaningful to compare data for annual periods before and after the levy was imposed in 2002. The Irish government acknowledged that by 2005 shopping bag use had slipped upwards, motivating a levy increase in 2007. Irish government officials have not collected numbers relating to plastic consumption for bin liners, apparently happy to celebrate the re-gained beauty of their countryside, now largely liberated from plastic bag litter. In any case, there certainly isn’t any practical reason why garbage pail liners should contain more plastic than shopping bags that have served the same purpose.
The levy is the answer
One gets a sense from Cirko and other spokespeople that the plastic industry knows the gig is up. The good old days when retailers paid for the bags and passed them out for free — without anyone paying attention to issues of resource depletion, energy use, litter, waste, and harm to marine life — are coming to an end. Cirko’s suggestion that there are bigger environmental issues misses the point. If we aren’t able to tackle absurdities like handing out eight billion plastic bags in Canada each year then our chances of resolving bigger, and ultimately related, problems are slim.
Frivolous consumption of a valuable product is at the heart of the matter. A significant levy on bags promotes more responsible behaviour. Recycling, on the other hand, doesn’t deal with the over-consumption problem. Indeed, distributing millions of reusable bags is also not a solution if stacks of them simply pile up in homes without any incentive to bring them along on shopping trips. A collective response in the form of a significant levy on plastic (and paper) bags puts everyone on an equal footing, without punishing progressive retailers.
My experiment proved it is possible to go from 250 bags annually (the figure Cirko cites for the average Canadian’s bag consumption) to virtually zero. (I took one plastic bag from a restaurant in Chinatown last April.) In fact, if each person reduced by even 50% this would mean an overall decrease of four billion bags in Canada. In Ireland plastic shopping bag use actually dropped from 328 to 21 bags per person.
And what about the dogs and video clerks
Unless you have a massive dog, a shopping bag with an eight-kilo capacity is excessive. Other single use bags such as produce, magazine, or bread bags (along with a glove for the skittish) — are abundant and can easily stand in for grocery bags.
Video store clerks may have gotten used to handing out plastic bags so people can pick up pet waste or simply be happy, but there is a better way – with significant benefits for the planet, and our dogs.
