So we will get a plastic bag tax? Wow, big
deal!
The sheer quantity of rubbish strewn around
our countryside is something that has long annoyed me. Plastic bags being a
particular bugbear, some roadways being strewn with them on the verges, some in
the hedgerows and often bags flapping around in the trees. Yet in recent
years, although the level of litter has not improved, there are fewer plastic
bags in evidence. The biggest plastic bag problem has now become dog mess bags,
which some dog owners use to collect the poo then for some strange reason use
to decorate trees along footpaths.
I tend to avoid using plastic bags in most
circumstances but occasionally they are useful, an unplanned purchase or to buy
something that could spill like some DIY materials. I then reuse them for a
while before finally relegating them to rubbish sacks, especially for ‘dirty’
rubbish in the garage. Yesterday was one occasion, when I went to get a Sunday
paper only to have the heavens open with a torrential rainstorm – so I had a
plastic bag rather than get home with a block of papier mâché.
Reading the bag was quite instructive. It says that “Over 20% of the
material in this biodegradable bag is from a renewable source” It also says
it’s recyclable and biodegradable to ISO14855 standard. Well, perhaps that’s
not environmentally perfect, but it’s better than most of the packaging around
the shop products themselves. If I were to simply throw it away it wouldn’t
hang around on my garden hedge for 1000 years.
On getting home I pulled out a few more bags from my garage rubbish
stash. Yes, recyclable, yes biodegradable. Next one, yes recyclable and
biodegradable. The next one was a French one – Catena, a DIY/houseware shop in
Normandy. Recyclable, indeed it is, and biodegradable, with a nice cheerful
message explaining how the bag is 100% ‘fragmentable’ by light and heat.
So why do we suddenly now require a plastic bag tax? It’s not as though
it will only apply to non-degradable bags and encourage degradable ones – which
would make at least some sense. It will of course cause increased use of paper
bags – which require more energy to make and are less useful because they are
not rainproof. It will increase the sales of manufactured bags for waste bin
liners which are thicker, more material and energy intensive and only get used once.
As is all too frequently the case our politicians see a problem late
then come up with a solution which we have to pay for and which will make
things worse, in this case by failing to promote biodegradability and causing
people to adopt more environmentally costly and damaging solutions.
