Daniel McCaffrey: Better things to worry about than plastic bags in landfills

Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

The news that South Australia is to ban plastic shopping bags in a few months will probably excite deluded Greens in New Zealand. They should get their environmental priorities right. It's a backward step.

One of Paul Keating's finest legacies was the Australian Productivity Commission. It provides state and federal Governments with impartial information on matters and stops them before being stampeded into stupidity by noisy pressure groups and political zealots.

The Productivity Commission did a fine report on Waste Management in Australia (December 2006). According to the commission the case for regulating plastic shopping bags rested on three points.

They were an undesirable source of litter. They could injure or kill wildlife, particularly in the marine environment, by choking them. And there was a scarcity of landfill and plastic shopping bags contributed to this.

The commission report noted that plastic shopping bags were 1 per cent of the content of landfills and were 0.2 per cent by weight of solid waste going to landfills in Australia.

Rather than saying the bags were a landfill problem the report said "plastic bags may have some landfill management benefits, including stabilising qualities, leachate minimisation and minimising greenhouse gas emissions".

As for the litter problem the commission said only 0.8 per cent of bags became litter. People are not stopping their cars on the way home from the supermarket and taking the groceries out of the bags, and throwing the bags on the street.

The number of fish strangled off the coast by plastic shopping bags last year was nil.

Before anyone gets too excited about plastic bags they should look at the research done by William Rathje of Stanford University. He drilled into American landfills and discovered that the main content was paper (40 per cent). Plastic bags did not figure. Disposable nappies were 2 per cent.

There are no problems with landfills in New Zealand. The country has thousands of gullies that modern landfill techniques can turn into flat fields.

But there will be problems with the South Australian ban. People will have to spend a lot of money on plastic bags they previously got free. They have a lot of uses around the house, not least as bin liners.

Citizens will have to buy millions of "reusable" bags. If every household in South Australia bought five - and that is a modest number - then the cost would be millions of dollars.

Meat products will leak into the recyclable bags, which are not liquid proof. People will get salmonella.

So the Government of South Australia is poised to annoy the hell out of the citizens.

It is an exercise in the most cynical of politics designed to capture the green preference votes at next year's election.

When the Green Party in New Zealand calls for a ban on plastic shopping bags, it shows it has lost its way.

It is still focused on the issues of the 1970s.

To bother about harmless plastic bags when one regularly reads reports of sewage on Kiwi beaches, Rotorua's lakes stinking with putrefaction and nitrate runoff, the scarred land slips of the backblocks sliding into the streams and the cow slurry slithering into rivers shows misplaced priorities on a worrisome scale.

* Daniel McCaffrey, formerly of Auckland, writes from Australia.