A woman pays for her purchases at a Carrefour supermarket in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China. (REUTERS/Sean Yong)
China to sack plastic shopping bags
By Eoin O'Carroll | 05.28.08
A growing acknowledgment of the ecological damage caused by thin plastic shopping bags is prompting more and more communities to ban them. Last year, San Francisco outlawed the things for large supermarkets and pharmacies. Last week, the city council in Malibu, Calif., gave large retailers six months to phase out the bags. And now the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, is considering a ban.
Oh, and China.
The world’s most populous country, which according to Reuters uses three billion plastic bags a day, will be instituting a ban on June 1. After that, production of all plastic bags less than 0.025 millimeters thick will be banned. Retailers will no longer be permitted to hand out the bags except for fresh and cooked foods.
Thicker plastic bags will still be permitted, but the law requires shopkeepers to charge customers for them.
Reuters reports that the ban will save China 37 million barrels of crude oil each year. But the story quotes many who are skeptical that the ban can be enforced. The plastic bag manufacturers who spoke to Reuters expressed concern about competitors flouting the law.
Perhaps the world’s most ubiquitous consumer good, plastic bags are known to cause widespread damage to the environment. Made from petroleum or natural gas, they take more than 1,000 years to break down under normal conditions. Until then, many billow from trees, clog storm drains, or wind up in the ocean, where they may choke and entangle marine birds and mammals, and particularly sea turtles, who have trouble distinguishing them from jellyfish.
Many of the bags find their way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of trash – 80 percent of it plastic – that is twice the size of Texas.
China is not the only country to have announced a ban on plastic bags. According to another Reuters story, several countries have moved to eliminate the bags, including Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Eritrea, France, Ireland, Italy, and Rwanda.
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2. Eoin | 05.28.08
Good question. They are in the sense that they are less likely to be reused and more likely to blow away from a dump and into the alimentary canal of a marine bird or sea turtle. They are not in the sense that they use less petroleum than a thicker plastic bag.
The real problem with these bags is also their main advantage: they are cheap and disposable. Producing a canvas shopping bag, after all, takes more than 10 times the energy of a plastic bag. But people are less inclined to toss a canvas bag after just one use. The same goes for the more durable plastic bags.
3. Chris (csmonitor.com) | 05.29.08
Though perhaps unexpected, plastic bags are reused in China, and other developing countries, until they fall apart (and even then they are re-used as waterproofing, and other things). The good thing about this law is, like canvas bags, these more durable plastic bags will last longer and slowly the paradigm will change to encourage shoppers to switch over to cloth or nylon bags entirely.
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1. Dan | 05.28.08
Are bags thicker than 0.025 millimeters less of an environmental threat?