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Cash and carry on
Battle rages over Bangladeshi government's ban on
'killer' plastic bags
Arshad Mahmud
Guardian, Wednesday March 27, 2002
Ten days after Bangladesh officially banned all
polythene bags last month, Hossain Shahriar received an anonymous email. It read:
"You hampered our business. You don't know our power. We can purchase minister and
secretary any time. So you're a little fly for us. We can kill you anytime". And then
came the chilling warning: "Give up your activity against plastic and us or leave the
country forever. So take this final chance."
Shahriar, an environment journalist who is also
executive director of the Environment and Social Development Organisation, a Bangladeshi
NGO, was unmoved, although he admitted he was worried about his staff members. "I'm
used to this kind of threat," says the man who had spent 13 years campaigning against
the bags and was the main architect of the ban.
The police couldn't track down the emailer, but the
message left no one in doubt that it had been sent by someone from the powerful plastic
bag manufacturers' lobby, which had fought tooth and nail up to the last minute to save
its multi-million dollar business.
If the ban works, then it is expected to have a
significant effect not just on people's health, but on the whole environment.
Plastic bags are a relatively new phenomenon in
Bangladesh, and only began to appear in the early 1980s. Within a few years, they had
become popular largely because they were cheap and easy to carry. So some people decided
to cash in, setting up a few manufacturing units.
The low-cost investment and the huge profits -
almost six times the production cost - resulted in a huge growth of the industry. The
number of factories rose from 16 in 1984 to more than 300 in 1990.
Within a few years, plastic bags became a feature
of everyday life. It was, however, not until 1988, after the pernicious effects of the
bags' widespread use became apparent, that the environmentalists and policy makers got
worried.
The non-degradable bags proved to be the main
source of waterlogging during the 1988 and 1998 floods that submerged nearly two-thirds of
the country. Almost 10 million bags are used in Dhaka city alone everyday and of them,
only about 10-20% are thrown into dust bins. The rest, discarded haphazardly, cause
serious waterlogging by choking the drainage system.
Shortly afterwards, researchers found that bags
stuck in farmlands, have reduced fertility in the soil, raising concerns about
agricultural production.
They also posed a serious threat to human health,
especially to people involved in the production and recycling of polythene. A large number
of people in old Dhaka, where most factories are located, were found to be suffering from
respiratory problems, eye sores, dizziness and even skin cancers. Experts confirmed that
two deadly substances, dioxin and hydrogen cyanide, were released into the air when
polythene was burned.
The industry has fought the ban legally and
illegally. "I was offered hundreds of thousands of pounds in bribes," says
Shajahan Siraj, the forest and environment minister who saw the ban through into law.
"But we cannot hold the entire nation hostage to the greed of a handful of people. We
must save the environment for our posterity."
Industry leaders claimed that the dangers were
exaggerated, though they admitted the bags were the main cause of waterlogging. "But
if they were that serious, why is the developed world still using them," asks KM
Alamgir Iqbal, president of the Bangladesh Plastic Goods Manufacturers Association.
"The drainage system should be managed by the municipal authorities - not us."
He also argues that banning the bags would mean the
collapse of a £38m-a-year industry that employs more than 7,000 people. The government
estimates it will lose about £20m in taxes and other duties.
The minister dismisses the industry claims, saying
the losses would be temporary. "We will be able to employ far more people through
reviving the moribund jute industry, producing environment-friendly jute bags," he
says.
So far, the ban seems to be working. People are
once again getting used to buying jute and paper bags, and plastic bags are no longer seen
in the markets. Yet scepticism persists over whether the ban will work and whether the
government will be forced to yield to the manufacturers, as it did when the bags were
first banned in 1993.
"The situation is different this time",
said Khondoker Bazlul Haq, a leader of the Bangladesh Environment Movement. The tremendous
awareness created by the anti-polythene bag movement, he says, ultimately will scupper any
sinister move.
This week, the government is introducing a bill in
parliament imposing 10 years' imprisonment and a £12,000 fine on people who continue to
make the bags - and a mandatory £6 fine for anyone found using one.
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Drowning in a tide of
discarded packaging
While
Janet Mills goes on her one-woman crusade and the government considers a tax on plastic
bags, Britain's waste mountain grows
John Vidal,
Environment Editor
Guardian,
Saturday
March 9, 2002
Last week Janet
Mills of Ealing, west London, went bananas. Literally. She went to a petrol station and
found a single fruit sealed inside a thick, moulded plastic container. "Right, that's
it. It's far too much", she told the man at the till.
She ripped the
plastic open, put the banana back on the shelf and the package in a bag which she then
took round to the nearest recycling bin. The man, perhaps fearing for his life, was
dumbstruck Mrs Mills is waging a fierce one-woman, some would say obsessive, campaign
against excessive food packaging. Her self-appointed task is herculean - to reduce the
amount of plastic that British food retailers and fast food outlets use.
She admits it's an
uphill struggle and people can find her a bore. "But we are drowning in a tide of
packaging", she says wearily, almost tripping over discarded crisp packets and fast
food chip holders, water bottles and sweet wrappers outside a fast food restaurant.
"Look",
she says, walking into a nearby supermarket stacked to the rafters in the plastic of
several continents. "Why do we have to buy tea wrapped up in a bit of paper, covered
with another bit, inside a carboard box which is covered in plastic?" She takes
umbrage at a tasty-looking snack lunch which features seven bits of separate packaging to
wrap a miserable bit of cheese and a few busicuits.
She is aghast at
the frozen food counter where a bit of cod is sold on a plastic tray inside two separate
plastic bags which fit inside a Cellophane-wrapped carboard box. When she finds pork chops
"double bagged" and packed in a microwaveable plastic tray sealed with
polyproplylene film, she is speechless. The stacks of mineral water bottles which needs
five seperate pieces of plastic to make them work warrant barely a glance.
Mrs Mills has a
point which is being taken seriously at the Department of the Environment, which this week
announced it would consider a tax on plastic bags, along with Ireland but some way short
of Bangladesh which this week banned plastic carriers.
The government
knows that Britain's food packagers are on an unstoppable roll. The US may be the
undisputed emperors of packaging, discarding 2.5m plastic bottles every hour, but we are
fast catching up and it is believed (the statistics are contradictory) that we use more
food packaging per person than any other country in Europe.
Last year the
British food packaging industry was worth more than £7.5bn, 10% of the value of all the
food we grow, and our food and drink was sold in 1.7m tons of plastic and a similar amount
of cardboard. That is more than double what we used 10 years ago and, despite directives
from Europe and exhortations from Defra, the situation is getting worse. Today we use, and
then chuck, 500m plastic bottles and 8bn plastic bags a year.
Efficient
plastic
But the British
Plastics Federation is upbeat. "Plastics are amongst the most environmentally
suitable materials for use in many packaging applications", it says. "Plastics
are efficient because they are recyclable, they have low energy requirements in their
manufacture and distribution; they do not pose pollution problems when incinerated.
"Packaging
without plastics would result in increases of 300% by weight, 150% by volume and 100% in
energy consumption. By using plastic up to 40% on food distribution fuels costs are saved,
which in return, reduces environmental pollution", says the spokesman.
The food industry,
too, is wedded to plastic which it argues is a societal and economic boon. Packaging, it
argues, is indispensible not just for keeping produce fresh, or to give it a longer shelf
life and protect food, but to actually sell the food.
"The big
trend in food packaging", says the American Food Technology Association "is for
it to be made thinner and lighter, and this has led to a dramatic reduction in all
countries' food packaging by weight".
The supermarkets,
too, are upbeat. They take no responsibility for what customers do with their packaging,
nor do they insist that it is recycleabale, but they claim to be reducing and recycling
far more themselves. They know that they will need to do far more as the government tries
to tightens up the European packaging and packaging waste directive.
Asda claims that
it has reduced its packaging, the Somerfield group has introduced recycling bins at almost
10% of its stores, and Waitrose sells low density polyethylene "bags for life"
which, if they are handed back, are recycled into furniture and given to schools. A
spokesman says the company wants to phase out all its hard-to-recycle Pvc bottles and
reduce its 56,000 tons of packaging waste. At the rate it is doing this, it could take
until 2050 at least to be rid of it all.
But 4m tons of
food packaging ends up in landfill sites a year and only Tesco has switched a part of its
organic food to biodegradeable packaging, made of potato or wheat starch. Sainsbury's is
running a pilot scheme but the reality, according to the Somerset-based Potatopak company
which makes eco-friendly packaging, is that British potato farmers would need to grow an
additional 4m tons to replace all polystyrene food packaging.
However,
supermarkets and around 1,500 municipalities in Italy, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands
are using carrier bags and bin liners made from potato and corn starch.
Instead, as
Britain inches forward, the global food industry is roaring ahead. The latest idea, says
Wes Sawatzkyt of the Alberta trade office in the US is to engineer "dynamic
active" packaging that can modify the atmosphere which food is sold in. So, with a
plastic tray of meat may come a small plastic capsule of carbon dioxide which is released
when the food is put on sale, "enhancing" colour and flavour. This
"provides the ultimate in freshness, aromatisation, product appeal and
convenience."
Meanwhile, the
British mountain of food packaging keeps rising and is driving councils, communities and
the government to distraction. No-one wants to tackle overpackaging, says Mike Childs of
Friends of the Earth. "Sod all is happening because the Department of Trade and
Industry has gone out of its way to be as unhelpful as possible".
He says that it
has been left to trading standards officers "who have been given little guidance at
what constitutes overpackaging and who have only prosecuted one person in three
years". An unlucky Northamptonshire butcher was fined £300 for having a piece of
meat on an upside down plastic tray inside another plastic tray.
The litter problem
is growing inexorably. The Tidy Britain campaign estimates that we now strew 25m tons of
litter on our streets and verges, almost all from food and drink packaging. Just 40 years
ago the figure is thought to be 5m tons.
Litter fines
Last year there
were only 500 court prosecutions in Britain for littering, and wardens fined just 422
people on the spot. More than 300 of these came from the south London borough of
Wandsworth. This week Michael Meacher, the environment minister, announced the doubling of
on the spot litter fines to £50, and gave eight councils some cash to employ wardens.
As refuse
collectors are trying to cope with ever fuller wheely-bins, councils are grappling with
the costs and benefits of incinerations. The anti-incineration movement has provoked more
than 100,000 people to demand better recycling and the government's waste review is
expected to demnand more recycling.
Campaigners say
the need is clear: of the 15m plastic bottles used every day, just 3% get recycled, which
is better than the 1% of the 8bn plastic bags recycled. Walker's Crisps alone sells 4.3bn
packets a year in Britain. "Unfortunately because of the light weight of the flexible
packaging used for our products it is uneconomic at the moment to attempt to
recycle", it says.
Mrs Mills
contemplates one of the Walker's packets in the gutter. She leaves it there. "I'd
like to take the man who invented those things and throttle him. And the person who
dropped it."
Around the
world
Bangladesh
At its third attempt the government has banned plastic bags in Dhaka. More than 9m are
dumped every day with only 10-15% put in bins. The rest end up in a creaking drainage
system causing blockages and sewage problems.
Austria
One of the most waste-conscious countries in Europe. You can take a glass milk bottle from
home and just refill it at a pump which tells you which farmer it came from and how many
hours old it is. Austria now has 880,000 recycling containers - far more than in Britain
with a population just a fifth of the size - and recycles 45% of its plastic. By 2004 no
plastic will be allowed into landfill sites.
Germany
Industry must take back and recycle all used packaging. In the first four years, the
scheme cut packaging by 1m tons. and manufacturers lightened their packages and marketed
their products in more concentrated forms. Each community has a "poison" service
which picks up old paints, old oil and varnish, as well as collecting places for
electronic products.
New Zealand
Now the world leader in "zero waste" with 45% of all local authorities now
committed to policies which by 2015 will have eliminated all waste being sent to
landfills, set up recycling industries for all goods, and forced producers to use material
that can be recycled.
Tips
· Buy
goods in bulk, avoid overpackaged items. Do not buy unrecycleable goods. Set up compost
heap. Buy locally.
· Reuse
paper and plastic bags, jars, bottles. Buy rechargeable batteries and goods that last.
Avoid disposable items.
· Separate
all waste and take to recycling banks. Buy recycled products.
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Taiwan to ban free plastic bags
3 October 2001
Taiwan is moving to ban the distribution of free
plastic shopping bags in an effort to cut down pollution, officials at the Environmental
Protection Agency say.
A law that is expected to be passed later this
month will begin by stopping government agencies, schools and the military from
distributing free plastic bags. The ban will later be expanded to include
supermarkets, fast food outlets and department stores.
Some 16 million plastic bags are given away daily
in Taiwan.
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Minister seeks to tax plastic shopping bags
Guardian Weekly, 23-29 May 2002
The Government is planning to introduce a tax of 9p
on every plastic shopping bag in an attempt to reduce litter and pollution, according to
the Environment Minister, Michael Meacher.
The move mirrors a successful scheme in the Irish
Republic, and is part of a refreshed green agenda for Labour, which may also include
introducing anti-litter and anti-graffiti wardens who could be given the power to find
offenders, Mr Meacher has told The Guardian.
He has called for a report on the Irish tax that
will look at whether the amount of litter has been reduced and whether it has changed
behaviour semi-permanently. Mr Meacher said: "I would be arguing very strongly
for putting something through. Obviously you have to talk about it with government,
get agreement - but it's a cracking good idea."
British shoppers are thought to use 8 billion bags
a year , which is 134 per person, and taxing them at the Irish rate would add 60p to the
average familiy's weekly shopping bill. In Ireland the tax has dramatically cut the
number of disposable polythene bags used. In Britain such bags are usually thrown
away as soon as the shopping is brought home, creating a huge waste problem.
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