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  The Electric New Paper 30 Apr 07
Don't Let Bags Become Baggage
Is convenience of plastic bags worth the harm their use does to environment?
IS Singapore a plastic-bag nation?

From the way consumers have responded to the Bring Your Own Bag initiative, it seems so. By Teh Jen Lee

IS Singapore a plastic-bag nation? From the way consumers have responded to the Bring Your Own Bag initiative, it seems so.

If people still use plastic bags - free or bought - the number of disposable bags used may not go down.

As it is, we are one of the top users of single-use plastic bags in the world. Even in Japan, well-known for its disposable packaging culture, consumers use 60 per cent fewer plastic bags than we do.

On average, every Singaporean uses 1.7 bags a day. But we are still much better than the shoppers in Hong Kong, who use an average of five bags per person a day.

That is why Hong Kong's Environmental Protection Department commissioned a study last year on plastic bags and was considering a levy on them. The international experience seems to argue for such levies.

In Taiwan, although more than 10,000 people took to the streets in 2003 to protest a ban on free plastic bags, there was an 80 per cent reduction when people had to pay for the bags.

In Ireland, the first country to have a plastic bag tax, there has been a 95 per cent drop since consumers started paying about 0.15 euros ($0.31) per bag in March 2002.

So should Singapore follow suit? Compared to paper bags, which are made from trees - a renewable resource - most plastic bags are made from crude oil and natural gas, a non-renewable resource.

However, paper bags use 40 per cent more energy to produce and generate 80 per cent more solid waste than plastic bags. So paper bags are not the way to go either.

As for plastic bags, they are problematic when overused and not disposed properly. However, many households cannot do without plastic bags, given that more than 85 per cent of our population lives in high-rise buildings, where refuse has to be bagged before it is thrown down the centralised chutes.

By comparison, half of Hong Kong's population lives in public housing, but they use more plastic bags.

Over-usage of plastic bags is less of a problem here than elsewhere when it comes to disposal, because Singapore incinerates almost half of its solid waste (the other half is recycled).

Plastic bags leave very little residue when incinerated, but incineration does release carbon dioxide, the major contributor to global warming. More bags to burn, more carbon emissions.

But if people want to reduce carbon emissions, there are more effective ways of doing that than reducing plastic bag usage.

A worse threat to the environment may not be over-usage, but the irresponsible dumping of plastic bags that end up polluting the sea and killing marine life.

Almost 9,000 bags were collected in the International Coastal Clean-up here last year - making up almost 10 per cent of all trash collected.

A study of seabird chicks in the middle of the Pacific Ocean found 90 per cent had plastic in their throats. When the animal decomposes, the plastic that was fatally lining its stomach will be released and eaten by other wildlife - in a vicious circle of death.

Biodegradable plastic bags are not a solution because in the time that it takes for the bags to decompose, they can still cause damage if not disposed properly.

The problem of plastic litter is real, but the culprit is not the bags. It is the user.

As someone said: 'Every piece of litter has a human face behind it.' Stricter enforcement against littering may be what we need.

For this problem, we may not need BYOB Day because we already have another acronym - CWO (corrective work order).
links

Bring Your Own Bag Day on the NEA website

Related articles on Singapore: plastic bags

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