New tricks for those tricky bags
Biodegradable. Compostable. The very words invoke a sense of gumbooted virtue but can be deceptively applied. They’ve been attached to some forms of supermarket bags on the basis of industry standards and testing methods that are all sorts of inadequate. The results turn out far prettier in the lab than in a landfill. Or an ocean. Or an alleyway.
To say something’s biodegradable just means it can break down in a natural environment. In more than just a few cases, what these bags break down into are teeny tiny microplastics.
And when they’re degrading in places that lack oxygen – like landfill sites – they can produce methane gas and acids. A bad end for products whose beginnings weren’t always flash either. Many are made from crude oil using carbon-based production processes.
For their part, compostable bags may have a future, the Ministry for the Environment acknowledges. But for now they, too, are to be avoided.
Most aren’t intended for home compost and at municipal level, lacking as we do the infrastructure to separate them from the rest of our waste and process them properly, the huge majority are fated to wind up in places that are far from nature’s compost bins.
So scientists are saying a better testing regime is needed to distinguish bagly virtues. In the meantime it’s not just nostalgia that has them saying that the cloth and jute bags that our forebears used are still the way to go.
No, no, some voices retort, rather than being a bad wrap, plastic is lately getting a bad rap. They point to the amount of land and the quantity of water it takes to make a natural fibre bag. They cite the many years each bag would need to be used before it ecologically earns its living. Replacing that bag because you’ve lost it or worn it out means the timer resets, while Gaia softly weeps.
There’s a sneery insistence that the movement against plastic bags is merely a misplaced salve on our consciences.
As supermarkets draw plaudits for phasing out single-use plastic bags, critics insist the most artificial product involved is the halo we fancy to be hovering over our heads.
Their scold is that replacing those bags is, on a personal level, fairly easy and has us feeling pretty good even as we then load those bags up with products that are themselves extravagantly packaged, then return to our fossil-fuel-powered cars for the short journey home.
But we are at least acknowledging those issues better too.
And this isn’t a misplaced pogrom against plastic, any more than it’s mere tokenism.
Now that China is no longer up for being a faraway repository for our plasticky pollution, and we’re hiffing our detritus to Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, the case for minimising and processing it ourselves is compelling.
The Government is still weighing up whether a levy or a ban would be appropriate but in the meantime we sorely need a far more coherent nationwide recycling system, proper Government standards for what truly constitute compostable materials, labelling them helpfully, and more vigorously pursuing better uses for so many of the products we dispose of badly.