Ban needed on plastic shopping bags

Plastic shopping bags get used for 20 minutes on average, then can take up to 1,000 years to break down in a landfill, say environmentalists.

Which reinforces what we’ve argued before: Getting rid of our plastic bag addiction can’t come soon enough.

Environmentally, plastic bags are a disaster, blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of marine and terrestial animals every year. And since China has stopped accepting the world’s film plastic waste — and other markets seem scarce — there’s literally nowhere to send the stuff. Halifax got a waiver from the provincial Department of Environment early in the new year allowing them to temporarily landfill what had become a hazardous mountain of film plastics, about 300 tonnes, piling up at the city’s material recovery centre.

Now the Colchester material recovery centre outside of Truro, N.S., has a similar, though even larger, problem — with more than 400 tonnes of flammable bales of film plastics to date — and it’s looking for similar relief from the province. It should get it.

Meanwhile, a growing number of municipalities in Canada are calling on their provinces or to ban plastic shopping bags.

Nova Scotia Environment Minister Ian Rankin has rightly said a ban wouldn’t solve the whole issue but that it is an option. His department is studying the issue — including looking at what municipalities and retailers want.

Such bans are in place in many parts of the world.

Some jurisdictions place fees on plastic bags. That’s been shown to also reduce usage, but we’d argue fees are a half-measure compared to outright prohibition.

In the case of shopping bags, simple, effective alternatives already exist, like paper or the sturdy, reusuable ones. Switching would be more a matter of changing what people are accustomed to than imposing any real hardship on consumers. Polls in a number of major Atlantic Canadian cities have shown more than 70 per cent of people who were asked said they favoured a plastic bag ban.

Retailers say a ban would not be their preferred solution but it’s acceptable, as long as it’s the provinces, and not individual municipalities, making the rules.

That’s fair. Retailers are understandably concerned that rules be standard across jurisdictions. Rankin is right: The issue is far bigger than just shopping bags. Film plastic is used extensively in society, including, importantly, to help preserve foods and keep medical devices sterile.

So it’s vital to keep looking for alternate ways to handle the rest of the film plastic waste stream. That includes innovative technologies that can convert waste to energy; for example, Halifaxbased Sustane Technologies’ new plant, being constructed near Chester, N.S. that’s expected to turn household garbage into biomass pellets and diesel fuel. Or the development of more truly biodegradable plant-based plastics.

Though the plastic shopping bag is only part of the problem, the bottom line is that it’s the one item we can easily choose to do without.