tim's experiment

Our leaders are proceeding inexorably to the next phase of the plastic bag ban, which will extend it to a variety of shops not already covered. This is a good time, then, to consider what has already been achieved, or not, as the case may be.

The original purpose of the ban on free bags was supposed to be to help the environment. The ban would do this by reducing the amount of plastic used to make bags, and by cutting the amount of plastic winding up on Government landfills in the form of bags which have been used and discarded. Has it achieved these objectives? Not at all.

What has happened is that the old flimsy biodegradable bags, which were given away free, have been replaced by the new Dreadnought model which is not biodegradable at all and is considerably bigger. The government has given different figures for the reduction in the number of bags produced by the new system, so let us take the highest one, which is 90 per cent. Now clearly whether the policy has reduced the amount of plastic consumed and later discarded depends on whether the new bags contain ten times more plastic than the old ones. If they contain ten times more plastic then the 90 per cent reduction just leaves us where we were. In fact they contain 30 times more plastic. This means that ten new bags have as much plastic in them as 300 old ones. So despite the reduction in the number of bags the amount of plastic wasted and land-filled has trebled.

This is officially regarded as a success. I wonder what failure would look like. And we have not considered the fact that a lot of the old bags were reused as garbage bags, a purpose for which many of us now buy rolls of plastic bags which are not included in the official figures for the reduction achieved. The other week the official concerned wrote to the SCMPost that the scheme was a success because it had produced a change in “shopping culture”. People now often carried a resusable bag. But that was not what was offered before the scheme started. If legislators had been told that the purpose of the scheme was to change “shopping culture” while trebling the amount of used plastic in landfills then they would not have approved it.

Still, this line of argument offers interesting possiblities for defenders of other government deficiencies. Our air pollution, for example, may be worse but it has caused a change in “breathing culture”. Numbers of vulnerable people have stopped breathing. Ah, the sweet smell of success!