Valerie you are letting your imagination run away with you. Cruise ships have to store all their waste and dump it when they reach port so they are out of this particular equation.
Plastic bags are a real problem but with you obfuscating and getting so many things wrong you divert attention from this.
I agree we should not just tax the plastic bag out of existence but keep on message, there is no reason we cannot replace them all.

Plastic may be used in cigarettes to hasten non-smoking.
" Flame retardant plastic and fire resistant plastic compound materials are produced by RTP. "

It works for metho drinkers. " Denatured alcohol, also called methylated spirits has additives to make it poisonous, bad tasting, foul smelling or nauseating, to discourage recreational consumption.. Pyridine, methanol, or copper sulphate can be added to make denatured alcohol poisonous, and denatonium can be added to make it bitter."

Health warnings and arsenic may be included in drugs like Ice and Ecstasy.

Just another Left-wing catastrophist fantasy to demonstrate Valerie's moral superiority. Too bad she can't get the facts right.

Take plastic bags as an example: for a start, she's talking about lightweight HDPE plastic shopping bags, such as those used in supermarkets. There are many other types of plastic shopping bags, including the so-called "Green", reusable bags which are now SOLD by supermarkets to gullible people like Valerie.

Most HDPE bags are NOT single use: they are reused numerous times for numerous purposes, such as picking up dog droppings, carrying your kids' wet swim suits and towels home from the pool, lining small kitchen bins and storing out-of-season clothing, to name just a few. And most are correctly and harmlessly disposed of in the normal garbage collection and go to landfill along with all your other waste. If plastic shopping bags were not available for such purposes, what would be used? Most likely people would buy the various packs of plastic bin liners, also available in supermarkets. Or they'd slyly walk away from the dog droppings, and wet clothing would be allowed to ruin whatever other contents your kids have in their school bags.

And what would you use to carry home your groceries? The "Green" bags? Probably not, since many supermarket visits are not planned. You might, of course, if you're prepared to buy more "green" bags on every such unplanned visit and you'd soon have a cupboard full of them, until you ran out of space and sent the lot to landfill out of frustration.

The cost to produce and distribute plastic bags to retail outlets is considerable and the lighter the bags, the less the cost, particularly in terms of fuel burned: HDPE bags are by far the most economical to make and distribute because of their light weight, so the "green" bag's benefits are largely illusional. And eventually, no matter what type of bag you use, it will end up in landfill: the lightweight HDPE bags take up far less landfill space.

If there is a genuine problem with plastic bag litter, fine the perpetrators.

For thousands of year until a few years ago, people carried goods without plastic bags, and still do in many places.
They had nothing for removing dog droppings though. What can we use instead of plastic bags for this purpose?

Plastic bags can be recycled as compressed bales, then used as an alternative to coal, to create quality, "direct reduction" steel with a much smaller carbon footprint!

Moreover, given clean cheap safe carbon free energy is made available by authorizing governments!? It's possible to make hydrocarbon based fuel or plastic from Co2 and hydrogen harvested directly from sea water!

Interestingly, as copious Co2 is removed from seawater, the atmosphere contributes similar amounts to make good that which has been removed! Given the natural affinity between water and Co2!

Various methods have been trialed? And while we are pumping seawater around an extraction plant, we could also desalinate it, using the new and vastly (four times) cheaper deionization method, which produces around 90-95% potable water!

As for Co2, I prefer proven vacuum towers and the application of thirty inches of mercury at the top of the tower, followed by stock standard fractional distillation to separate the resultant gases.

The Co2, then subjected to repeated compression cycles to liquefy it, thereby allowing compounding with liquid hydrogen to occur, not too dissimilar to the production of ammonia, or the catalytic conversion of (wasted) methane to liquid methanol?

And better than current planet wide flaring, which adds tons of Co2 to the atmosphere daily!? Much of which could be extracted, as above, to make sustainable liquid fuel, plastics or some fertilizer?
See google tech talks on U tube!
Alan B.

Memo to Valerie

Note Sister Jennifer's superior article to instruct yee http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=18778.

Re your paragraph 5. Have you not heard Trump will also Make Australia Great Again (MozGA)?

Reckon we should replace Aussie plastic bags with good'ol American paper shopping bags.

Sure more Aussie forests will be buzzed down, but our Koala BEARS are eating too much anyhoo.

Wouldn't it be lovely if these people who want to pontificate in print had some idea of which way is up.

Valerie has obviously never lived in the country, & tried to store anything in those shopping bags, where they are subject to even mild indirect sunlight. Ultraviolet stable they definitely are not. Within a couple of months they are disintegrating, & will be disappeared into dust in the soil, long before gum tree leaves have even started to rot down. A problem they are not, except perhaps in the inner city high-rise inhabited by plastic people.

I have a fabric tube hung in the broom closet. Shopping bags not torn go in the top, & are drawn from the bottom for a hundred uses as required. I occasionally have to buy bin liners to supplement my bag supply.

Now Valerie what is the difference between finely broken up plastic, & the finely broken silica sand that forms our beaches, none really. If you doubt this, get out of the city, climb onto a yacht, & go visit some of the Pacific islands. No not the resorts, go walk along some windward beaches. You'll be amazed what you find washed up. Most is in small pieces, although I did once find a ball gown/wedding dress, with a thong attached. I wonder what story they could tell.

A lot of it is decomposing plastic. Only the very expensive specially developed plastic is resistant to sunlight. Withy a mixture of Ultraviolet degradation, & the abrasion of washing about on a beach, nothing lasts long.

You would find that everything that got into the sea, soon sank, or was washed up on a windward shore somewhere.

The problem having environmental problems taken seriously, is the Greens.
No one could possibly take the Greens seriously, since legitimate environmental
concerns have morphed into second place behind the welfare of poofters.
This is the public face of the environmental movement...much to the glee of the LNP.

Hey hasbeen ...I'll give you two smilies for your contribution above...:-) :-)

And also hasbeen...it is very possible their was a bride in the wedding dress, (with thong): definitely prior to its watery end, but also possibly after its watery entry.

A gleaming white skull, stripped of flesh with no eyes and all soft tissue eaten, after three days. And if in the vicinity of hungry sharks, then the main body will be broken into small enough pieces for all sea creatures to gather around for the feast.
You've raised an intreaguing thought here today.
Leaves Vals plastic bags on a palm tree in the shade for interest, (sorry Val, you've been touchéd by Hasbeen ).

and now a few facts folks

"Because plastic pellets are magnets for toxic chemicals like DDT and PCBs, they effectively become poison pills. Japanese researchers found that concentrations of these chemicals were as much as a million times higher than in the water. Plastics themselves can leach endocrine-disrupting chemicals like biphenyl.

Many of the birds that come to International Bird Rescue's rehabilitation centers are impacted monofilament line that has wrapped around their limbs and wings.

What we know:
Plastic water bottles take 450 years to decompose;
Fishing lines and nets can take up to 600 years to decompose; and
Plastic bags or balloons in the ocean are dangerous (they can look like a jellyfish meal to a sea turtle)."

OK, nicknamenick, we're all waiting to know how YOU know that turtles "think" plastic bags "look like" jellyfish food.

Did a survey of turtles, did you?

The federal environmental agency, back about 2005, used to quote a Canadian study of "plastic shopping bag" waste in Newfoundland, which was said to kill "one million sea birds and animals a year".

Except it didn't. They were merely giving credence to a Greenpeace propaganda exercise which made the claim.

The actual study said that "plastic nets and fishing lines" were estimated to have killed "up to 100,000 sea birds and animals over a five year period". Plastic shopping bags were neither mentioned nor implicated. And the estimated kill rate was way short of the one million a year claimed by Greenpeace.

Did the Australian environment agency remove the claim? Of course not. They had been captured by Greenpeace.

So called public servants were running Greenpeace propaganda from within the commonwealth public service environment agency. With impunity.

When the Productivity Commission challenged the commonwealth environment bureaucracy about this claim, the public servants claimed the allegation was in a different journal by the same author. Which the author denied when asked by the Productivity Commission. Liars and scoundrels had infiltrated the environment agency as part of the long march of the Left through the institutions. It was all described in the Productivity Commission report on waste management at that time.

Calwest: Oh so clever?

Even so, it's hard not to see how less intelligent species like turtles, could mistake floating plastic for their favorite food? Jellyfish?

As ever, casting pearls before swine, is countenanced as unwise! As these omnivores might mistake them for something of nutritional worth?

As it would seem, equally applicable to turtles, in regard to floating plastic?
You'll have a nice day now Y'hear. Alan B.

calwest

Google [ turtle plastic] and see the pictures, read the words:

Global Change Biology, involved UQ’s Dr Kathy Townsend and researchers at CSIRO Hobart, Texas A&M University, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Honolulu, University of NSW, and Imperial College London, UK.
It was part of an Australian Research Council Linkage project supported by Earthwatch Australia, CSIRO, and Tsar Putin , Chairman Mao and the Sicily Mafia.

nicknamenick,

Google "turtle plastic" and the first image you get is one of a turtle with a piece - NOTE, a piece - of plastic bag in its mouth. The pic has been around since at least the mid-1990s. It was set up at Melbourne Zoo, which is why the turtle has only a piece of bag, not the whole bag.

Given the lies Greenpeace - and our federal environment agency - told about the Newfoundland research, there is no reason to believe that every photograph - or any photograph - of turtles and plastic are legitimate without a lot more verification. The Green Left of politics floats on a sea of lies.

As we know, you have a history of quoting selected authorities - such as National Geographic - without actually having any means of validating their claims. In this case, you quote as authorities a bunch of academics and government agencies. So what? Are you suggesting academics and government agencies are never to be doubted? How very religious of you.

Alan B.,

You're letting your fantasy get in the way of reason. Just because you THINK a turtle MIGHT mistake a plastic bag for food doesn't make it so.

There is no evidence whatsoever to support that contention, which has been promoted by the Left for a couple of decades.

calwest
"Are you suggesting academics and government agencies are never to be doubted"
No but taken at random from any site on [plastic turtle] with multiple pics and TV docos on sea-life the evidence is more convincing than your weak declarations . If the first pic was faked , you are implying other pics are shown. All fakes? So thousands of technicians faked the moon landing? " Fake" , shout it louder.

I usually take a backpack when I do my shopping, because it's more practical to carry a large load that way than in flimsy plastic bags. I also shop at Aldi a lot, where they're too tight to give away free bags and I'm too tight to buy them. So mostly for reasons of practicality, I don't end up with that many plastic bags. I don't find that my life suffers greatly as a result.

calwest,

Greenpeace are complete dicks, that I will grant you. They're still arguing that GM foods are dangerous, for heaven's sake... and yet they claim that climate change deniers are anti-science! Talk about the pot calling the kettle an excellent absorber of visible wavelengths of EM radiation.

But to argue along the lines that 'Greenpeace said it therefore it's crap' is fallacious; specifically it commits the ad hominem fallacy. Arguments stand or fall on their own merits, not the failings of the people advancing them. And the argument that polymer pollution in marine environments is a problem is not a crap argument.

Toni Lavis,

Normally, you'd be correct about taking each argument on its own merits. In the case of Greenpeace, however, we're dealing with a bunch of congenital liars whose motivation is invariably ideological. The starting point for any issue they are involved in is that they have zero credibility because they lie for political advantage.

nicknamenick,

You seem to have a lot of difficulty dealing with facts, which, to your fevered imagination, become "weak declarations". The facts as I stated them - including an expose of the lies of Greenpeace and the federal environment agency - were documented in the Productivity Commission's Inquiry Report No. 38, Waste Management, published on 20 October 2006. That's another fact. Deal with it.

You also leave an oily trail as you slide from a discussion of the lies and misrepresenations of Greenpeace and the federal environment agency, to your fantasy about fake moon landings.

What a knob.

Has anyone looked at the UN's MARPOL requirements? This required ships at sea to chop up waste into small particles before disposal into the ocean. Any plastic in that waste is also chopped up. Note that MARPOL requires that no plastic is disposed of in this way - like that is going to happen.

I wonder then why there are so many small plastic particles floating around?

I also wonder how plastic shopping bags find their way to the ocean in sufficient numbers to make any measurable impact? Note that the federal environment departments report on plastic bags suggests some 80 million bags are littered each year, but there is no data to support that number - it has simply been invented - the author of the report was a previous Greenpeace activist, so had little difficulty inventing data.

Meanwhile a Greenpeace UK spokesperson stated that they did not believe plastic shopping bags were a problem. Go figure.