Bags you pay plastic tax, Ireland tells shoppers

A user-pays scheme aims to reduce the use of plastic bags. CHARLES ARTHUR reports.

LONDON - Open a kitchen drawer in any home, and they will spring out at you like a jack-in-the-box.

Go to any beauty spot, and you are sure to encounter a few, trapped among the plants like giant insects or flapping noisily in the wind.

Floating in the local river or blocking your nearest storm drain, plastic carrier bags are an unsightly and environmentally degrading fact of modern life.

The Irish Government took action yesterday, imposing a tax of NZ30c - dubbed the "plastax" - on single-use plastic shopping bags, payable by the shopper, not the shop.

In Britain, supermarkets were considering whether the green levy might eventually cross the Irish Sea. Environmentalists, meanwhile, were estimating how far the annual consumption of 12 billion bags would fall if it did - and whether shoppers might change their habits if they had to pay for the environmental consequences of their actions.

The notion was given a tentative thumbs-up last night by British Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett after a meeting in Brussels with her European counterparts. "It's an interesting idea," she said. " ... Although it's not something we have in mind, we will watch the results of the Irish initiative with interest."

There is no doubt that the Irish Republic has a problem with plastic bags. The idea of a surcharge on every one, whether given away or sold, was first floated in 1999, but it has taken until now to implement. Even this introduction was delayed from January 1 because the Government feared that bringing in such a measure and the euro on the same day would be too much for consumers to cope with.

Ireland's bag tax is expected to raise more than $334.3 million annually, which will go into environmental schemes. But Bobby Malloy, the Environment Minister who first suggested the idea, was clear about its aims. He said yesterday: "The primary purpose of this levy is not to generate revenue, but to change consumer behaviour.

The environmental group Friends of the Earth believes it could be significant. Spokesman Mike Childs said: "Innovations like this will hopefully focus people's mind on reusing plastic bags, and reduce the amount of unnecessary waste. We will follow its effectiveness with great interest."

It might seem obvious that if you charge people for something which they formerly had free, they will use it less. The same logic underpins the proposals made a week ago by the Commission for Integrated Transport, to charge British drivers not for car ownership or petrol use but by road usage, based on demand.

Plastic bags can be recycled, but only about 0.5 per cent ever are, despite schemes such as that operated in Britain by Sainsbury's, which gives a 1p refund for every bag that is reused. Shredded and compacted, they can also be used as bedding for roads and in the construction of buildings.

Yet plastic bags represent only one part of the complex overall waste problem, according to environmental groups and those who make the bags.

At the British Plastics Federation, the watchword is restraint.

Federation adviser on industrial issues, Marcia Gick, said: "A survey in Australia found that cigarette butts caused four times more litter than plastic bags." The survey was done by weight.

And, she added, "the Irish have a large rural population, and a very bad record on waste collection and disposal."

European states have found a variety of ways to encourage recycling. In Belgium, supermarkets encourage reuse of their carrier bags by crediting shoppers with points on their loyalty cards.

In Finland, supermarkets pay a levy on the amount of plastic bags used, with the proceeds funding recycling.

Germany has been making advances in recycling for years. In 1991, store chains there were ordered to pay a levy to a recycling company, in return displaying the Gruner Punkt (green dot) on their products. Plastic bags have to be bought at the checkout for about $1, though environmentally friendly shoppers prefer cloth or wicker bags.

The Dutch are keen on recycling their carrier bags. They incinerate the bags in accordance with strict environmental rules and use the resulting energy to heat hospitals. Other states, such as Portugal and Greece, are, like Ireland, laggards in the recycling stakes.

However, for Friends of the Earth, taxing plastic bags barely begins to scratch the surface of the problem.

The problem is this: by 2020, according to an EU directive to which Britain has agreed, only one-third of waste to can be sent to landfill. That means either recycling or incinerating the other two-thirds. Incinerators are unpopular, at least with the people who have to live near them. So the answer is to recycle. And Britons do far too little of that.

"Our fear is that Governments put forward ideas for problems which are high-profile, but aren't part of a decent waste recycling strategy," said Childs.

"The Irish, we hear, want to burn all their waste to meet the 2020 directive - so we think that this plastax is more like a diversion from what needs to be done, and from their dirty-waste disposal schemes.

"And if you look at how much it would actually cost to introduce here - you would have loads of civil service time taken up with consulting shops, and then drafting legislation, and then with chasing shops to see how many plastic bags had been sold."

The plastax might turn out to be a profitable scheme for unscrupulous shopkeepers, which will keep the Irish Customs and Excise on its mettle. So what is the real solution? Friends of the Earth say it is much closer to home than the checkouts. "Ensure that every household has access to a quality doorstep recycling scheme, said Childs. "Then you could charge people for the household waste that they don't recycle. That has been introduced in the United States and Canada and has been effective in getting people to cut down on rubbish. It encourages people to think more before they buy stuff with lots of packaging."

- INDEPENDENT