Reducing plastic usage good for everyone

BEGINNING Jan 1 next year, consumers in Selangor will no longer be provided with free plastic bags and polystyrene food containers.

This is an extension of the “No Plastic Bag Day” on Saturdays that has been ongoing.

Those who want plastic bags will be charged 20 sen each.

The items exempted from charges include plastic bags for raw meat (pork, beef, poultry and fish), flowers, vegetables covered in soil (potatoes, roots and ginger), prescription medicine, poison, and live fish and other aquatic products.

This ban is to reduce pollution to the environment. Local council by-laws in the state have been amended to include this policy. Businesses must agree to go plastic-free when applying or renewing their licence and those caught flouting the polystyrene ban will face a RM1,000 fine.

Polystyrene food-containers are not known as white coffins for nothing. They are commonly used for food and drinks. Styrene leaches out when hot food comes into contact with the container. Styrene is known to affect the central nervous system and kidney function.

There was a time when we ate at the hawker stalls more often than order takeaways. When that was not possible, the food was usually wrapped in used newspaper lined with banana leaf. It was not the most hygienic way to pack food. The ink and paper could contain toxic chemicals. But there was nary a complaint as awareness of the risk was low or non-existent back then.

Plastic bags or sheets were used very sparingly to reduce cost. Used paper and banana leaves were cheap and abundant. Those who do not like the use of newspapers would bring their own enamelled tiffin carriers to take their favourite char koay teow or laksa home from the hawker stalls.

In those days, rice was seldom sold pre-packed in plastic bags like we have nowadays. We bought them by cupaks and gantangs, an old Malay measurement of volume rather than weight.

We could buy as much or as little as we wished and these were placed in newspaper bags. Likewise, fish and vegetables from the market were simply wrapped in old newspapers.

Fast forward 40 years to the present. Plastic is ubiquitous. Almost everything we buy is either wrapped in plastic or put into plastic bags.

According to Solid Waste Corporation (SWCorp), an entity established to complement and ensure the successful implementation of the National Solid Waste Management Policy, Malaysians generated 38,000 tonnes of domestic waste per day in 2015. Of that amount, 14 per cent are plastic waste.

Plastic can take up to 1,000 years to decompose and leak dangerous contaminants into the soil and water in the process. Comparatively, newspaper takes six weeks to break down while banana leaf will decompose in two to three weeks in a natural environment.

The slow biodegradability of plastic and its contaminants not only causes problems in landfills. It is recklessly discarded into our waterways and eventually gets flushed out into the oceans.

Plastic Oceans, a global network of non-profit charitable organisations, estimated that more than eight million tons of plastic are dumped into the oceans every year.

Microplastics are bits of plastic under five millimetres in length that have broken off from larger plastic pieces in the ocean. Ingested by fish and shellfish, these microplastics eventually end up on our dining table.

A study by the University of California, Davis and Hasanuddin University in Indonesia found human made debris which were either plastic or fibrous materials in the guts of roughly 25 per cent of fish sampled from markets in California and Indonesia.

While we would never knowingly eat plastic, we could be already be ingesting microplastics inadvertently through some of our favourite seafood and expose ourselves to the hazards of contaminant chemicals.

In view of this risk alone, we should consider reducing our dependence on plastic drastically in our every day lives. And we have not even talked about the havoc wreaked upon larger marine lives that have eaten or got entangled in bigger pieces of plastic.

Personally, I support the enactment of this no plastic bag and polystyrene policy by the Selangor government. Local authorities in Penang, Melaka and Sibu have banned the use of polystyrene food containers. Perak and Johor will follow suit soon.

This policy should be enforced nationwide for maximum effectiveness. While we are at it, we should also stop buying bottled drinking water and use reusable water bottles instead.

Reducing plastic waste is good for the environment and most importantly, for our health. There may be a slight increase in the price of food as alternative nonplastic containers are more costly. We can alleviate that and help reduce waste at the same time by bringing along a tiffin carrier when buying food like our parents used to do many years ago.

My late mother had bought food this way for as long as I can remember. When I rummaged through the kitchen cabinets after she had passed on, I discovered more than 10 tiffin carriers and stainless steel food containers of all shapes and sizes. She not only used them when buying food but shared the food she cooked with relatives and neighbours in these containers.

Like many shoppers in the Klang Valley, my wife takes several reusable shopping bags with us when we go for our weekly grocery shopping. This has been our practice since the “No Plastic Bag Day” on Saturdays was introduced sometime around 2010.

Bringing along a tiffin carrier or reusable shopping bags when we go shopping or buying takeaway food is not a difficult or burdensome task.

This was the practice a long time ago and can be practiced again. This is an initiative we should all support whether it is enforced in our municipality or not. Waste management is not the responsibility of the government alone.

We all must play our part because like it or not, we will ultimately live in a paradise or massive dump of our own making.

Comments can reach the writer via columnists@theborneopost. com