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In the bag
19th January 2008
A sixth of the world's population could stop using plastic bags
Between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are used every year - very few are recycled.
China plans to place a ban on plastic bags. Starting this June, businesses will no longer be able to use bags with plastic thinner than 0.025-millimetres (thicker reusable ones will still be permitted). The country joins Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya, Bangladesh, Uganda, Taiwan, Ireland, Paris and the little town of Leaf Rapids in Manitoba in taxing, restricting or banning plastic bags.
To just about any environmentalist, plastic bags are one of our worst excesses: They get used once and are thrown away, wind up clogging drains, create breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes, end up in the stomachs of wildlife halfway around the world, or pile up in landfill sites where they will take centuries to degrade. Serge Lavoie, president of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association, would not argue for an outright ban here because “we have the infrastructure to recycle them, but there is a good reason not to use them in somewhere like New Delhi.”
Each year, 500 billion to a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide – two billion in Beijing alone. If the ban is enforced, a sixth of the world’s people will stop using them.
Published in The Green Report in The Globe and Mail
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