Life without the plastic bag…?

by Diane Duane

Or, rather, without the flimsy semi-transparent bag with handles that cut into your hands like cheesewire if you put something in the bag that weighs more than a pound? Here in Ireland, it’s been a pleasure.

I see the concept of dumping the bag — by one mechanism or another — is being introduced in Los Angeles County now. (See this editorial at the LA Times for some details. Malibu has already brought in legislation, and I think so has San Francisco.) I see also that the normal kicking and screaming at the very concept is already ongoing — there’s actually a website called SaveThePlasticBag.com: glancing over it makes me vaguely curious to see who’s actually behind the Save The Plastic Bag Coalition, but not so curious that I’d veer off course to do anything about it on a work day. (ETA: It’s paid for by plastic bag manufacturers: scroll down in the article for confirmation.)

I wouldn’t presume to dictate to people who live in a place where I no longer reside. But I can say this for sure: after the Irish dump-the-bag initiative went into action in 2002, the urban, suburban and rural Irish landscape got visibly cleaner within a matter of just a few months. Now, in terms of bags at least, both countryside and cityscapes here are unthinkably different from the way they looked looked a relatively short time ago. Not pristine, by any means. There are still a lot of Irish who’re slobs (though slowly this seems to be changing). But a main cause of litter and secondary pollution is now gone.

Five years ago, in a country that’s supposed to be famous for the beauty of its landscape and environment, you would have found it impossible to locate a country hedgerow that did not have the dirty, tattered remains of plastic bags snarled in it, fluttering in the breeze. I can’t describe how horrendous this looked. Fences were festooned with the filthy things; they were caught in trees, lay clogging roadside ditches, went blowing down every country road until they wound up in your back yard or your garden. (City streets and roads were far worse in this regard.) Sewers overflowed after getting full of them, seabirds and other wildlife got strangled by them either externally or by ripping them up and eating them; they covered the bottoms of ponds and could be found half-buried in wetlands and mired in protected peat bogs. The damn things were everywhere.

Part of the reason this happened, I believe, is because the bags were free: and as about almost any other free thing, people just got unconscious about the plastic bags and what was done with them. They didn’t matter.

Finally the government got off its butt and did something. And they did it in a very smart way: by making the bags matter. They didn’t outright ban them. They just said, “Okay, if you want them, you can have them. But you’ll have to pay for them. Not a crippling amount: just enough to concentrate your mind on the issue of whether you really need them or not.”  The charge was, as I remember, 15 cent. (Now it’s thirty-three.)

At the same time, all the major and minor grocery chains started offering more durable bags at the checkouts. They too cost money — ranging from a Euro to several Euro depending on how big the bag was — but anyone who stood at the checkout and did the math in their head quickly realized how much money they were going to save on the reusable bags.

Peter and I were really interested to see how this was going to go. We’d already been converted to the reusable-bag concept years earlier during various trips to Germany and Switzerland, where sturdy inexpensive cloth, paper and reusable plastic bags have been on sale at the checkout for a long time. (These are also countries where you will genuinely still see people carrying their shopping around the local city markets in wicker baskets, some even with gingham linings.) We had about ten or fifteen of these strong cloth bags in the kitchen closet already. So as our local groceries started featuring the new cloth or plastic-weave bags, naturally we picked up some in the course of business. But I was particularly interested in seeing how our neighbors would take the changeover.

I was astonished to see that almost without exception, all the people in our immediate neighborhood went practically immediately to the position, “Sure I’d sooner pay for a good bag once than pay for those cheap things every week, they just pile up and make a mess: what’s the problem?”  It seems that the rest of the country went pretty much the same way: the Times article suggests that the use of disposable plastic bags dropped off by 94% “within weeks”. And this among a people who are notoriously conservative about a lot of things.

But now we have clean fields and woods and hedgerows… and significantly less litter and damage to something that’s unquestionably a national resource: the Irish landscape. As well as far less sheer waste of something that (leaving aside the issue of other environmental impact) is better not made and thrown away thoughtlessly than made and casually ditched.

So now it’ll be interesting to see what happens in LA. (It looks like IKEA’s unilateral bag fee is producing results similar to the Irish national figures.)

But meanwhile I note this page at the aforementioned save-the-plastic-bag site:

We are a California-based coalition. The initial focus of our campaign is California. However, the anti-plastic bag campaign is a worldwide problem and we want to be as helpful as we can regardless of location.

(snort)  Guys, three(ish) words for you as regards Ireland, at least:  BUTT OUT KTHXBYE.

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4 comments

ElaineN July 27, 2008 - 2:07 pm

I don’t remember seeing that many plastic bags when I was in Ireland in the autumn of 2006. My greatest joy was walking into my first pub and realizing that I could breathe. I had not realized that Ireland had instituted a smoking ban, and was expecting the foul air I had remember from British pubs two decades ago.

I’ve been using the $1 reusable bags for a while now. I am still in the “remembering to consistently take them into the store” stage, but much prefer them since they can care so much more without me worrying about the bag breaking. Next step: get my mother to start using them. I take her to the grocery store every two weeks, and it would be just as easy for her to use my bags, which are always in the car.

P J Evans July 27, 2008 - 3:30 pm

Most of the stores here in Los Angeles seem to be selling cloth bags these days: they apparently want to get rid of the plastic bags. I can’t blame them: the things are nuisances in the trash, don’t hold much weight, and the contents always seem to want to climb out. (I’ve been using cloth bags for years.)

Andrew Timson July 27, 2008 - 3:56 pm

I’m surprised that stores don’t kick up more of a fuss; if I had to pay for bags, I’m going to be buying less stuff at the store in order to minimize my surcharge. (Even if I had reusable ones, the same thing applies, since I wouldn’t want to get anything that didn’t fit in all of the ones I brought.)

Where does the per-bag fee go, in Ireland? Does the store keep it, or does it go to the government? (The government collects it, and it goes to environmental enforcement and cleanup programs. Things like dredging shopping carts out of local rivers, cleaning up illegal rural waste dumps, etc. DD)

P J Evans July 28, 2008 - 4:15 am

Landfills hate plastic bags, BTW. Too many people dump them in the trash empty, which guarantees they’ll blow away on the first breeze that comes by. The one I worked (in West Texas) at had a fence blow over one day: the fence had caught a lot of bags, and a really strong gust came along and flattened it. (IIRC, that gust registered all of 200 pounds on the 70-foot truck scale.)

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