Clean North

Tax on Plastic Shopping Bags

Posted by: Kathie Brosemer (kathie) on March 07, 2002 at 00:25:20
from the shop-til-you-drop-the-bag dept.

From the Independent, March 5, 2002:
As Ireland goes green and imposes a tax on plastic shopping bags, should Britain follow suit?
By Charles Arthur, Technology Editor
Story, below.

05 March 2002

Open a kitchen drawer in any home, and they will spring out at you like a jack-in-the-box. Go to any beauty spot, and you are sure to encounter a few, trapped among the plants like giant insects or flapping noisily in the wind.

Floating in the local river or blocking your nearest storm drain, plastic carrier bags are an unsightly and environmentally degrading fact of modern life.

The Irish government took action yesterday, imposing a tax of 15 cents (9p) * dubbed the "plastax" * on single-use plastic shopping bags, payable by the shopper, not the shop.

In Britain, supermarkets were considering whether the green levy might eventually cross the Irish Sea. Environmentalists, meanwhile, were estimating how far the annual consumption of 12 billion bags would fall if it did * and whether shoppers might change their habits if they had to pay for the environmental consequences of their actions.

The notion was given a tentative thumbs-up last night by the Secretary of State for the Environment, Margaret Beckett, after a meeting in Brussels with her European counterparts. "It's an interesting idea," she said. "We are in close touch with our Irish colleagues on environmental issues, and though it's not something we have in mind, we will watch the results of the Irish initiative with interest."

There is no doubt that the Irish Republic has a problem with plastic bags. The idea of a surcharge on every carrier bag, whether given away or sold, was first floated in 1999, but it has taken until now to implement. Even this introduction was delayed from 1 January because the government feared that bringing in such a measure and the euro on the same day would be too much for Ireland's consumers to cope with.

Ireland's bag tax is expected to raise more than £100m annually, which will be channelled into environmental schemes. But Bobby Malloy, the Environment minister who first suggested the idea, was clear about its aims. He said yesterday: "The primary purpose of this levy is not to generate revenue, but to change consumer behaviour.

"I want to see a significant reduction in the use of plastic shopping bags and a subsequent reduction in the number of bags that end up as litter."

The only exemption in Ireland's shops and supermarkets are the so-called "bags for life", sold by many supermarkets for the equivalent of 10p, which are replaced for free when they wear out.

Indeed, many Irish supermarkets reported a brisk trade in these last weekend. On this side of the Irish Sea, a number of groups are watching developments closely.

The environmental group Friends of the Earth believes it could be significant. FoE spokesman Mike Childs said: "Innovations like this will hopefully focus people's mind on reusing plastic bags, and reduce the amount of unnecessary waste that is so easily created. We will follow its effectiveness with great interest."

It might seem obvious that if you charge people for something which they used to get free, they will use it less. The same logic underpins the proposals made a week ago by the Commission for Integrated Transport, to charge British drivers not for car ownership or petrol use but by road usage, based on demand.

Plastic bags can be recycled, but only about 0.5 per cent ever are, despite schemes such as that operated by Sainsbury's, which gives a 1p refund for every bag that is reused. Shredded and compacted, they can also be used as bedding for roads and in the construction of buildings.

Yet plastic bags represent only one part of the complex overall waste problem, according to both environmental groups and those who make the bags. At the British Plastics Federation, the watchword is restraint.

The BPF's senior adviser on industrial issues, Marcia Gick, said: "A survey in Australia found that cigarette butts caused four times more litter than plastic bags." The survey was done by weight.

And, she added, the Irish have a very different problem from us in the United Kingdom. They have a large rural population, and a very bad record on waste collection and disposal."

The Irish counterpart of the BPF lobbied, unsuccessfully of course, against the plastax. Now the BPF must consider whether it might arrive here * although Ms Gick is quite confident that it will not.

"The only other European state which taxes plastic bags is Denmark, which has a tax on all packaging * and a similar problem to that of Ireland, with a big rural population and not enough recycling. And there have been complaints from other European Union states that the tax creates a distortion in the market and so is against EU rules."

However European states have found a variety of ways to encourage recycling. In Belgium, supermarkets encourage re-use of their carrier bags by crediting shoppers with points on their loyalty cards.

In Finland, supermarkets pay a levy on the amount of plastic bags used, with the proceeds funding recycling.

Germany has been making advances in recycling for years. In 1991, store chains there were ordered to pay a levy to a recycling company, in return displaying the Gruner Punkt (green dot) on their products. Plastic bags have to be bought at the checkout for about 30p, though environmentally-friendly shoppers prefer cloth or wicker bags.

The Dutch are keen on recycling their carrier bags. They incinerate the bags in accordance with strict environmental rules and use the resulting energy to heat hospitals. Other states, such as Portugal and Greece, are, like Ireland, laggards in the recycling stakes.

For members of the BPF, any tax on carrier bags is sure to be bad news. But environmental groups feel that they are absolutely the way to go * setting up the way for a radical clash of objectives in the years ahead.

In fact, for Mr Childs at Friends of the Earth, taxing plastic bags barely begins to scratch the surface of the problem * which in Britain is huge, but largely hidden from our daily sight, just as we tuck those bags away in kitchen cupboards and drawers.

The problem is this: by 2020, according to an EU Directive that the UK has agreed to, we must only send one-third of our waste to landfill. That means either recycling or incinerating the other two-thirds (or, since landfill space is running out, especially in the south-east, even more). But incinerators are unpopular, at least with the people who have to live near them. So the answer is to recycle. And Britons do far too little of that.

"Our fear is that governments put forward ideas for problems which are high-profile, but aren't part of a decent waste recycling strategy," said Mr Childs.

"The Irish, we hear, want to burn all their waste to meet the 2020 Directive * so we think that this plastax is more like a diversion from what needs to be done, and from their dirty waste disposal schemes.

"And if you look at how much it would actually cost to introduce here * you would have loads of civil service time taken up with consulting with shops, and then drafting legislation, and then with chasing shops to see how many plastic bags had been sold."

The plastax might actually turn out to be a profitable scheme for unscrupulous shopkeepers * which will keep the Irish Customs & Excise on its mettle.

So what is the real solution? Friends of the Earth say it is much closer to home than the checkouts: "Ensure that every household has access to a quality doorstep recycling scheme." At present we recycle 11 per cent of our household waste. While that has increased from 8 per cent a few years ago, it is still a long way from the 66 per cent needed.

"Without decent recycling facilities, people across the UK will continue living next door to polluting incinerators and filthy landfills," says Mr Childs. "Then you could charge people for the household waste that they don't recycle. That has been introduced in the US and Canada and has been very effective in getting people to cut down on their rubbish. It encourages people to think more before they buy stuff with lots of packaging. That's what we really need in this culture."

Weighing up the environmental cost

• British shoppers use eight billion carrier bags per year * 323 per household and 134 for every person
• If laid out flat, they would cover an area 200,000 times the size of Oxford Street
• Plastic bags, ranging from bin liners to carrier bags, produce 380,000 tons of waste per year.
• An average household uses 300 grams (0.7lbs) of plastic bags per week, one third of plastic waste. The rest comes from plastic bottles and containers.
• A survey by the Department of Environment found one in five Britons would not even consider recycling plastic bags.
• Of those who did recycle bags, 39 per cent used them to carry their sports kit.
• British Polythene Industries, formerly the polythenes arm of ICI, makes more plastics bags in the UK than anyone else
• Plastic bags are expected to take between 20 and 1000 years to break down in the environment. Orange and banana peel degrade in under two years.
• More than 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles worldwide are killed by plastic rubbish every year. Turtles in particular are prone to mistaking the bags for jellyfish, ingesting them and dying of intestinal blockage.
• A study of albatross chicks on Midway Island, near Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean, found that nine out of 10 birds had plastic rubbish in their gullets.