The secret lives of plastic bags
Plastic bags have been in the news a bit lately and as I was lining the laundry rubbish bin with a re-purposed plastic shopping bag, it occurred to me that I know very little about where plastic bags come from, where they can end up and what the options are for managing unfavourable environmental side effects. When I have questions about waste, the Matamata-Piako District Council waste manager can be relied on to provide some enlightenment. After speaking with him, I came to appreciate that when plastic is recycled, it cannot typically be turned back into the same product. For example, milk bottles cannot be recycled into more milk bottles. Instead they find a second life in things like recycling bins.
Furthermore, plastic cannot be recycled indefinitely because each recycling session forever alters the chemical structure of the plastic, limiting the scope of future applications. On average, it seems like plastic can have seven reincarnations with the last port of call presumably being landfill. Single-use plastic shopping bags are not at the end of their recycling capacity, but economic and logistical factors make recycling such bags a difficult proposition and they are not recycled as part of the council recycling programme. Plastic bags can be recycled into things like outdoor furniture, but the minuscule weight and volume of individual bags is such that, for example, over 16,000 bags are needed for a single park bench.
The time and effort required to manage so many individual items adds to the cost of the final product. Plastic bags may also cause other problems in the recycling waste stream. Plastic bags have an unfortunate tendency get caught up in the moving parts of sorting machines at recycling depots, reducing the efficiency and increasing the cost of other recycling activities. Although there are recycling options for shopping bags in New Zealand (some supermarkets provide bins to collect soft plastics for recycling; check out www.recycling.kiwi.nz/softplastics/store-locator/ for you nearest store) it sounds like there are still some special challenges. This may be one of the reasons why there is so much dialogue about reducing the number of plastic bags in the first instance, and a compulsory plastic bag charge has been suggested as something that can help achieve that.
Supporters of a compulsory bag charge point to the English example where a nationwide compulsory charge resulted in an 85 per cent reduction in plastic bag usage. Based on my current understanding around the opportunities and challenges of plastic bags, it seems that a nationwide mandatory plastic bag charge is worth debating further. I ampleased to know that plastic bag charges were discussed at the Local Government New Zealand conference this year. .
-James Sainsbury is a Matamata Ward Councillor for the Matamata-Piako District Council.