PLASTIC BAGS BAN IS TOXIC

IT’S bad enough that Woolworths wants to stuff its customers around with its pointless new plastic bags ban. But must they die for the planet as well? What a crazy business model. Make it harder for customers to take home what they buy, and have some die trying.

Just check the “green” reusable bags Woolworths wants shoppers to buy and use instead of the thin ones it once gave out free.

The label says these “green” bags are made of polypropylene, a plastic, and warns: “Do not wash bag.”

I get it: washing will shorten the bags’ lives. But hang on: reusing “green” bags — especially unwashed ones — potentially exposes shoppers to the deadly E. coli bacteria that can breed in food and all those leaks and spills from your meat and dairy.

In 2007, San Francisco banned plastic shopping bags, too.

A 2012 University of Pennsylvania study estimated an extra 5.5 people a year then died of food poisoning because “green” bags had increased shoppers’ exposure to the E. coli bacteria inside them. “Subsequent bans in other California municipalities resulted in similar increases,” it found. No surprise there. The International Association for Food Protection tested a sample of reusable bags from shoppers in California and Arizona and found they were “seldom if ever washed”. “Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags … Escherichia coli were identified in 8 per cent of the bags … “When meat juices were added to bags and stored in the trunks of cars for two hours, the number of bacteria increased tenfold.” Given that risk of food poisoning, it seems crazy for Woolworths to sell reusable bags with a warning not to wash them.

But isn’t this so typical of green policies?

Bugger the humans.

And now there’s this pathetic bag ban, already adopted by some states and soon to be imposed by Coles. The Productivity Commission warned against this a decade ago, publishing a study which estimated that just 0.8 per cent of these allegedly “single-use” bags become litter, and noted that those going to landfill did some environmental good, having “stabilising qualities” and helping with “leachate minimisation and minimising greenhouse gas emissions”.

Yes, I’ve heard those teary stories about some whale or seal with plastic in their gut, although I do wonder why all shoppers must suffer for the sake of a whale or two when we cheerfully slaughter more than 100,000 sheep, cattle and pigs every day. But it seems these sob stories are exaggerated.

The Australian’s Adam Creighton last week interviewed Phillip Weickhardt, lead author of that Productivity Commission report.

He said: “The evidence plastic bags hurt marine life is very unpersuasive.

“When we looked at this we found that a lot of studies just cite each other; in fact, we sourced it all back to some guy in Canada in the 1970s who’d done a study on the effect of fishing ropes on marine life,” Weickhardt said.

Raising fines for littering made much more sense, and most of those who were demanding a bag ban were just following a “religion, deeply felt”, he said.

Weickhardt is right.

How else could Woollies get away with selling “green” bags that actually aren’t?

Such “reusable” bags are made of a thicker plastic that takes much more energy — mostly electricity — to make than do the now-banned “single-use” bags.

That means much bigger emissions of the carbon dioxide that greens claim causes dangerous global warming.

An RMIT University study figured shoppers would therefore have to use their “green” bags every week for well over a year to have less impact on global warming than they would by using new plastic shopping bags each time.

But if you washed those green bags to save yourself from food poisoning, would you actually get a year’s worth of use?

That RMIT study also nailed the great lie of the ban-the-bags campaign.

These “single-use” bags actually aren’t “single use” at all.

Shoppers actually use 60 per cent of them a second time — to line bins at home, for instance, or pick up dog droppings or wrap food.

What else will shoppers use instead for all those little jobs?

Well, when South Australia banned plastic shopping bags, sales of the thick green bin liners — much harder on the environment — shot up fivefold.

But what do all these facts matter when we’re talking to green activists with the fire of faith in their shiny eyes?

It doesn’t even matter to them if a few Australians die of food poisoning.

Doesn’t any proper earthworshipping cult demand some human sacrifice?