Of course it's a meaningless gesture, just like all virtue signalling. The corporates have become bigger wackos than even the eco nuts, instead of providing goods at reasonable prices - their only reason for existence.

They will make millions of $ profit by doing it, before they paid for the plastic bags for customers now customers will pay for the plastic bags.

Banning giving plastic bags a brilliant strategy to turn a loss into a profit.

Good article, with meaningful insights into the stupidity and irrelevance of bans such as those on straws and supermarket plastic bags. While the criticism of companies likes Woolworths is justified, the worst offenders are governments and politicians who try to bask in the perceived glory of such ineffectual actions.

Gee willikers, I won't be able to drink my beer now, plastic straws are banned. I'll have to use pretzels. Not the soft soggy one I've cried into, but fresh new ones.

And as you say, Eric, most of this waste comes from far more populous areas! Including CO2 emissions. But sanity has to start somewhere with Leadership by example!

And none more important than decarbing the economy. With a carbon-free energy source that will also (absolutely guaranteed) turbocharge it!

Plastic can be baled and used in place of coal in direct reduction steel smelting, or as new age, superior, more durable bitumen.

Our waste tyres collected and melted down in industrial microwaves can make around 50,000 barrels of oil P.A. and earn a tidy sum for a few remote outback villages with no economy, when the drought hits!


Then there's Ewaste and better concentration of rare precious metal than any orebody, and virtual child's play to extract. The missing element is affordable energy. Be it converting wast tyres to crude oil or just affordably recycling waste.

Or indeed desalinating/demineralising copious potable water and pushing it inland. For affordable, broad-scale irrigation!

Current (mad hatter) energy policy paradigms and privatisation have made most of this uneconomic!

If however, we had (cooperative) SAFE, CLEAN, CHEAP energy (nuclear/thorium) that cost the consumer as little as 1.98 cents per KwH. And very doable and at a reasonable profit! Electrical energy that cheap will have the energy-dependent, high tech manufacturing queuing to relocate.

Then nothing is impossible, including recycling plastic as many as seven times. or indeed extracting CO2 directly from seawater and with nuclear technology at our disposal. combing it with hydrogen gleaned from the same source.

Via the catalytic cracking of the water molecule, to produce all manner of liquid fuel, plastics and fertiliser.

All proven rather than hypothetical science.

And worthless if we are, as usual, last in the queue to decarb our economy!

Albeit, there's almost enough vehement and ferocious, table-thumping, hot air emanating from Canberra, to do most of the above!
Alan B.

So true Burnie. The banning of disposable plastic shopping is even more annoying.

I have lived in this house for 26 years, bringing my groceries home in plastic bags. I never throw out a plastic bag, unless torn, or full of garbage. I have a dispenser into which go all plastic bags after emptying, to be drawn to line waste paper baskets, &/or enclose rubbish which would get smelly if not removed from the air. Every plastic shopping bag that has come into this house undamaged has been used for a useful purpose. I will now have to buy just as many bags as I have got for free up to now.

This dispenser has never filled, so all our shopping bags have been used for a useful purpose. With our one man garbage collection, paper not enclosed in a bag gets blown all over the street, so we will have to buy small kitchen tidy bags, or litter the street.

Of course if we were real activists we would save all our waste usually discarded in shopping bags, & dump it on parliament house steps. Pity we are not as rabid as the greens.

Of course we can blame Labor for this stupidity. If they weren't totally dependant on green preferences, & green support, even they would not be so stupid as to enact this garbage.

This policy enacted with a coalition government ensconced in Canberra!

DO GREEN PREFERENCES MATTER THAT MUCH?

Hasbeen, I've done exactly the same! And now need to buy PLASTIC BIN LINERS. Which ultimately changes little. And I expect a similar outcome for most folk!?
Alan B.