BOURNE COMMENT

A personal view of issues
and events

by REX NEEDLE

DEMONISING THE HUMBLE PLASTIC BAG

Shoppers at Sainsbury’s and Tesco are being told as they pass through the checkouts that from October 5th there will be no more free plastic bags in which to pack their purchases. Instead, they will have to pay 5p each for them. They will be stronger and therefore reusable but will no longer be handed out like so much confetti as they have been in the past.

This particular imposition has been rumbling along the corridors of power for the past eight years and now after a suitable interval of silence on the subject it is being foisted on the public by the government under the guise of environmental safety yet a quick check around the world reveals that many countries and organisations have rejected claims that these bags are such a serious threat.

Yet everyone will comply with the new regulation but it is a sure bet that few know actually why this levy is being imposed and will meekly accept. One thing is certain, that although the end of free plastic bags is a government ruling, there will be suspicions that the powerful supermarkets have had a hand in this because they will benefit from not supplying plastic bags which has been costing them dear with one of the larger outlets for instance, paying as much as £25 million a year.

The war on plastic bags began in the autumn of 2007 when over seventy local authorities across Britain started lobbying the government for the right to ban those issued by supermarkets in an attempt to reduce the amount of waste being sent to landfill sites and although this sounded an acceptable way forward it did not actually stand up to close scrutiny because most people use the carrier bags given away at the checkouts for other purposes which is the very essence of the recycling initiative.

Campaigners also protested that they polluted coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and in oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. Fortunately, the myth of environmental damage by plastic bags was dispelled the following year when it was revealed that they had been unfairly demonised as a result and the evidence used in the campaign to curb, ban or tax their use had been based on flawed research (The Times, 8th March 2008).

The newspaper pointed out that scientists and environmentalists had exaggerated their claims and that there was no scientific evidence to show that plastic bags posed a direct threat to marine species on which the effect was minimal while they created only a minute proportion of public litter and far from not being degradable, they were unlikely to survive for longer than 10-20 years although anecdotal evidence suggested that they could deteriorate far sooner.

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, had announced his intention to force supermarkets to charge for plastic bags saying that they were one of the most visible symptoms of environmental waste and this was supported by many, not least local authorities and retail organisations and even the Council for the Protection of Rural England, but as a result of the revelations by The Times the government was criticised for setting a bandwagon rolling based on poor science.

The initiative therefore foundered and was quietly forgotten until this year when it surfaced as a fait accompli due to be enforced from next month on the grounds that it will reduce waste and improve environmental standards. Yet nothing new to support its implementation has been established other than to save money for the giant supermarkets which are currently under pressure over high prices from the likes of Lidl and Aldi who have become major competitors by setting a new pace in consumer satisfaction and so the established outlets must economise where they can and cutting the supply of plastic bags would seem a good place to start, especially as Lidl and Aldi do not issue free plastic bags and never have and the likes of Sainsbury’s and Tesco must have been eyeing this policy with envy for some time.

The millions of home owners who have been recycling those issued free at the checkout will now have to bring their own bags or pay up at the rate of 5p a time and to replace those required for recycling back home they will buy rolls of plastic bags from the stores themselves to meet the demand. The government also seems to have forgotten that households which do not use plastic bags to dispose of kitchen waste have been dumping them in the silver bin devoted solely to recycled materials which dents the government’s argument even further.

The problem of disposable plastic bags has arisen because they have a high profile as a result of reports of them blowing around the countryside whenever there is a high wind, dumped on roadside verges or littering the streets although this is inevitable when so many of them have been distributed across the country each year but pro rata, the misuse is extremely small when compared with the value they have for other purposes in the home which is the very essence of recycling. Discarded bottles and beer cans are a far more common sight discarded in public places yet there is no move to restrict or tax their use whereas plastic bags pose an easy target.

Unfortunately, much of the information circulating about plastic bags has bitten deeply into the human psyche and as with many mistaken beliefs in the lexicon of the sceptical, such as UFOs and global warming, the subject has been given so much media exposure that the public perception will remain unchanged and the use of the humble plastic bag likely to be forever tainted by rumour and falsehood.

We have been told that in future, 5p will be charged for each plastic bag by the larger retailers and although this does not apply to the smaller and medium-sized outlets employing 250 or fewer full time workers, they will be entitled to charge if they wish, the perfect example of skewed thinking because the size of a workforce can in no way determine the fate of the plastic bags they issue. As a result, the annual plastic bag usage currently estimated at 8.5 billion is expected to drop by up to 80 per cent and the resulting cost of a substitute will fall on the consumer.

Furthermore, the government’s 1,600-word directive on charging issued by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is so detailed and complex that it will be a bureaucratic nightmare to implement. Few store owners will have time to read let alone digest and enforce the instructions therein, of which this is a prime example: “The bags must be of certain dimensions not counting the gussets and handles, and so the general rule will be a 5p charge for every plastic bag although there will be no charge for bags used for a whole list of certain commodities such as uncooked fish, axes and knives, prescription medicines and live aquatic creatures in water” although the department also rules: “A bag can contain multiple items from this list and not incur a charge. However, if the bag contains other items then you must charge. For example, you wouldn’t charge for a bag containing an unwrapped blade and unwrapped loose seeds, but adding a box of cornflakes means you’d have to charge.”

Once the bags have been sold, retailers then face the marathon task of keeping records and accounts which is all far too complicated to report here but if the rules are not applied then they are likely to be found out by an inspector from the local authority who will be empowered to make spot checks and defaulters can be fined up to £5,000. The entire operation will cost a great deal of time and money and at the end of it, the department says that: “Once you’ve deducted reasonable costs, it’s expected that you’ll donate all proceeds to good causes.”

The department also warns: “You must send the following details to Defra once a year: (1) the number of bags you distributed, (2) the amount of money you received from selling bags, (3) any VAT you had to pay from the money you received, (4) what you did with the proceeds from bags and (5) details of the ‘reasonable costs’ you had to pay to provide bags. This information will be made public.”

My goodness, what a palaver for the sake of a few plastic bags!

Whitehall is full of small back rooms filled with jobsworth lawyers, accountants and economists beavering away at the legislative coal face but someone in government should have called a halt to all of this nonsense, studied the evidence rather than accept the hysterical pronouncements from some corners of the media and left the humble plastic bag to its own devices.

Far from being a global villain, it is a simple and useful artefact of modern life, both ubiquitous and necessary, and has been doing no one any harm yet the government in its ham-fisted way has managed to turn it into a pariah of the retail trade to the detriment of customers.