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The Forum > Article Comments > Rubbishing on about plastic bags > Comments

Rubbishing on about plastic bags : Comments

By Valerie Yule, published 30/4/2008

It is possible for householders to work out how to dispose of their rubbish without using so many plastic bags.

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"Most kitchen scraps can feed pets and worm farms. Banana skins and tea leaves make special foods for pot-plants, camellias, roses and hostas. Cordon-bleu cooks make exquisite sauces and soups from bones and scraps."

Sorry Val, this is completely unrealistic. We're not all pottering around with our cats in our inner city terrace with nothing better to do than sort our rubbish. Some of us have kids to feed and clean up after. Plastic bags are an important convenience. Mandatory worm farms is just crazy talk.

Besides, the Productivity Commission has already demolished the extreme ant-bag arguments. They are just not that big of a problem.

That said, I wish Coles would give me the option of using stiff paper bags. They were always superior for carrying your shopping in anyway.
Posted by grn, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 12:00:59 PM
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Funny thing, being in my sixties, I can remember wrapping all moist rubbish in newspaper. It was then placed in a newspaper lined garbage tin. This worked very well. I suspect that rubbish disposed of in this way would break down quicker after it was dumped.
Posted by Flo, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 3:19:12 PM
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grn,

too funny!:-)

I just wrote a whole post on that in the general discussion.
Posted by Usual Suspect, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 4:13:42 PM
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I dutifully put my rubbish out once a week. Rubbish may well include plastic bags surplus to my requirements. As soon as the rubbish is on the kerb awaiting collection I have no more interest in it. The rubbish is now the property of the Council. It is up to the Council to dispose it in any way they think proper.

Rubbish disposal is one of the services provided by council with my rate money. How the council do the job, that I pay them to perform, is their business. I would have a legitimate complaint only if the council failed to collect, or a careless council worker littered the street.

None-the-less, I can not but laugh at the embarrassment of Peter Garrett, as yet one more crazy impractical green idea went down the plug hole.
Posted by anti-green, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 4:27:36 PM
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Grn and others, really, listen to what you're saying. The inconvenience of spending 7 seconds to sort your rubbish or, (startling thought) find an alternative to the one - yes only one - type of plastic being proposed for a ban, is too much. And reference to the Productivity Commission is misplaced - they didn't demolish the argument against plastic bags, they simply demonstrated that as extreme economic rationalists they cannot even understand the argument that reducing waste is actually good. Under their demented accounting systems, resource effiency is not an economic (or any other) benefit. Not a high quality source of information. Plastic bags is not the most pressing of environmental problems - but if Garrett et al can't solve this one, with broad public support and absolutely trivial costs, I fear they won't be able to solve much of anything.
Posted by next, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 6:00:47 PM
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In 50 years of ocean diving including full-time research since 1982 into world fish stock depletion and consequences and solutions I have never seen any animal dead in the wild due to any plastic bag. I have seen environment activist photographs of half a dozen animals claimed to have died due to plastic bags. There is no data or photographic evidence to prove plastic bags are killing marine life as claimed.

In contrast to politics of plastic bag rubbish including that even promoted by government, unprecedented mortality of marine animals and malnutrition amongst island people is occurring due to starvation. The starvation and islander malnutrition is linked to sewage nutrient pollution that is feeding algae and epiphyte growth that is smothering estuary and bay seagrass food web nursery.

Fish stock and food web devastation and the real state of the marine environment is being gagged by major media and government while damaging development is allowed to continue.

Claims about stopping plastic bag use and marketing of alternative imported 'green' bags is tantamount to extortion.
Posted by JF Aus, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 7:13:48 PM
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JF
the fact that plastic bags aren't a primary cause of marine deaths, doesn't make attempts to ban plastic bags either wrong or extortion. It also doesn't mean that there aren't more pressing environmental issues that must be dealt with - please don't make the mistake of pitting one environmental problem against another as though we can only solve one.
Posted by next, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 9:26:55 PM
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I use those green enviro bags when I do scheduled shopping, I even have some of those older calico bags that I use regularly. I also, when doing some lunchtime shopping, and at other times, use plastic shopping bags. These are then recycled as garbage bags. If I cannot get these, I will buy plastic garbage bags, which raises a point:

If plastic shopping bags are banned, I will undoubtedly buy a 'reusable' bag each time I shop, which will mean that I will use a number of those as garbage bags.

Those free shopping bags are so cheap because they are made from a petroleum gas that is otherwise going to be burnt, So, the choice for the environment is: plastic bags as landfill (a form of carbon capture), or petroleum gas burnt creating greenhouse CO2?

Wrapping rubbish in paper means that there will be less paper to recycle.

Talk of garbage bins is a distraction. 30 years ago we used to put out one or two garbage bins twice a week. In many areas this rubbish was burnt. Now we put out about the same amount of rubbish, it is just collected in a different and more economical way. We are trying to recycle more glass and paper. In high density living it is not possible to have worm farms and the like.
Posted by Hamlet, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 10:23:20 PM
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It is good to have so many opinions about plastic bags. Answers to most of the worries that we cannot solve the plastic bag problem are in a careful reading of the original article, including the question of why need bin-liners. On other points: There are also many other useful products can be made with the ‘waste’ petrochemicals now turned into plastic bags. If you are going to put some rubbish somewhere, you might as well put it where it should go – no need to sort it later. I have seen enormous amounts of plastic bag litter mucking up rivers and on shores, and the like ... I have not seen a trapped or choked animal, neither in seventy-nine years out in the world have I seen a person shot, yet people assure me that happens too. But JF is right that the really terrible problems for fish stocks are food-web devastation and other man-made depredations.
We waste a tremendous amount of food today in one way or another; no-waste was one big reason why seventy-years ago people had such small dustbins collected once a week. Wartime Britain had ‘pig-bins’ even in flats and apartments, collected to feed pigs; our flats and apartments have rubbish collections, and there are non-mandatory worm farms for scraps that are cheap, inconspicuous and easy. Plastic bags are not a problem for the Productivity Commission because they are profitable, but they are in their billions just too much for an economy.
Seventy years ago and before that too people did not spend so much time cleaning up after kids, because the kids had less to strew around, and had to help each other clear up; families did however not have electric appliances like we do, and general cleaning took more time. People shopped with baskets and there was less to buy. As well, there were deliveries by horse-and-cart. We cannot go back to that, although shopping by phone and internet has been one substitute.

Finally, who said anything is impossible?
Posted by ozideas, Thursday, 1 May 2008 8:24:52 PM
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next,

It is extortion through misuse of authority to use law or threat to force plastic bags out of use by claiming they are killing thousands of marine animals when they are not, in order to save retailer money for the throw away bags and to secure money for the reusable bags. The public is intimidated by threat and blame that use of plastic bags is killing marine animals. False pretense is also involved. It is wrong to gag and intentionally ignore unprecedented marine animal starvation and solutions.
Posted by JF Aus, Thursday, 1 May 2008 10:00:26 PM
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Thank you , JF Aus, for publicising the serious problem of gagging information about unprecedented marine animal starvation and solutions. ‘Profitability’ drives the gagging.

1. Major reasons why other countries are reducing one-trip plastic bags are the waste of petrochemicals and the litter problem, including in landfill, which councils recognise.

2. Retailers like the low-cost bags because they can be filled faster at checkouts, so work out cheaper.

3. The evidence that plastic bags are killing marine and land animals can be seen at http://www.abc.net.au/science/features/bags/,
http://www.planetark.com/campaignspage.cfm/newsid/62/newsDate/7/story.htm, and www2.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/ npws.nsf/Content/media_230104_royal_trial.

(There are other things we have not seen ourselves, such as shootings, but there is evidence that they happen.)

4. The Productivity Commission’s arguments are at http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,19228242-2,00.html, but their driving interest is profitability now, not the future.

5. So much of responses to ideas about saving are emotional - on both sides. Can we stop being biased by our own personal wishes?
Posted by ozideas, Friday, 2 May 2008 9:25:08 AM
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Ozideas,

The ABC 'science' site you refer to shows a photograph of a single turtle with part of one plastic bag hanging hanging from it's mouth. Green turtles depend on seagrass for food as well as crabs that depend on seagrass habitat. By 1982 Western Port Bay Victoria had lost 100 square km of seagrass out of a total of 150 sq km. I expect nutrient pollution exposed from deep dredging in Port Phillip Bay will wipe out more seagrass and more turtles but the ABC does not report these matters. Who in the ABC profits from this gagging?

The Planet Ark site shows one photograph of only one dead animal, a bryde's whale with what appears to be a single plastic bag in the stomach. There is no evidence this whale died from that plastic bag. Bryde's whales eat small fish such as anchovy, herring, pilchard, all of which are seriously and generally depleted, all seagrass dependent. Nutrient pollution is killing seagrass and media gagging of the problem is stopping debate and solutions. Australian south eastern and east coast seagrass that I know of is devastated, causing for example, unprecedented mass starvation of millions of mutton birds along shore of 4 states during October 2000. The initial SOMER report acknowledged 50% of seagrass lost from the NSW coast. In Queensland for example, I find over 90% of seagrass lost from the Nerang River alone.

The ark people say on their site, quote, "Tens of thousands of whales, birds, seals and turtles are killed every year from plastic bag litter in the marine environment as they often mistake plastic bags for food such as jellyfish". end quote. Accordingly I submit, THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC OR OTHER EVIDENCE TO SUBSTANTIATE THIS CLAIM.

The waffle and emotion or whatever is distracting attention from real damage to the marine environment and socio-economic impact and dire urgent need for solutions. If anyone can prove me incorfrect then do it now. Otherwise what does PM Rudd intend to do about these national and international major issues?
Posted by JF Aus, Friday, 2 May 2008 11:50:14 PM
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