What has Ireland, Wales, Bangladesh, Kenya and Botswana all got in common? It’s not a group of countries you would often see connected together...Any guesses? No? Well, they have all managed to implement bans or levies on plastic bags that have drastically reduced their use.
Back in England, a proposal to introduce a levy was shelved back in February and our stance has begun to look a bit irrational and isolated. Last month Scotland decided to implement a 5p levy on plastic bags that will provide £5 million for charity. New figures from WRAP (the Waste Resources Action Programme) show that the number of plastic bags handed out is actually increasing to an incredible 8 billion a year! The Guardian covered this news last week http://bit.ly/15R3lEX
The statistics on the numbers of plastic bags used in England are staggering. According to the Marine Conservation Society, every household in the UK uses 300 every year. More arresting is the fact that the average lifespan of a plastic bag is 12 minutes-I guess that is the time it takes to carry your shopping into your car or back home-and then it is discarded.
Our use (and abuse) of plastic bags are emblematic of our wider relationship to a product that is cheap and found in products we are all using. Plastic is a huge and worrying issue in the marine environment because so much ends up being blown and washed into the sea. Here it floats around for decades being broken down into tiny particles that are eaten and form the beginning of a toxic food chain. A study found that 95% of Fulmars found washed up dead around the North Sea contained fragments of plastic. As a floating bag closely mimics a jellyfish they can be eaten by leatherback turtles and whales, which can clog their gut and kill them.
I think we all have to own up to a bit of hypocrisy here. Very few of us can claim to live a plastic-bag free existence, which is why a little nudge is all it should take to make us do the right thing. In Ireland, a 15 cent charge for a plastic bag led to a 90% reduction in their use. It needs to be just enough to make us think about doing the right thing, and as Scotland has demonstrated, the money can be used to support good causes too.
It is great to see the Marine Conservation Society, Surfers Against Sewage, the Council for the Protection of Rural England and Keep Britain Tidy, come together to solve the issue through the ‘Break the Bag Habit’ campaign. In terms of a solvable environmental problem, this is the easiest, biggest, and ripest of the low hanging fruit. If our Government in England can’t step up to solve it, then I am a banana.
Wales brought in the single use bag levy in October 2011 In July 2012, the Welsh Government released a brief summary covering 13 retailers which showed reductions of 35 – 96% since the launch of the carrier bag charge. This showed that in food retail there were between 70% and 96% reductions and in fashion between 68% and 75% reductions.
In partnership with Tesco their customers in Wales have helped fund some great work for the RSPB, with over £1 million raised so far. The overall reduction in single use bags in Wales is fantastic, but it would be great to see England follow suit - after all we all share the same seas.