THE AUSTRALIAN - Editorial 11-1-8

Good advice on plastic bags has been binned

OF the hundreds of Productivity Commission reports produced to provide good advice based on facts and not widely held assumptions, few have caused as much controversy as last year's boringly titled Waste Generation and Efficiency. Contained within the report was unwelcome news for anyone who passionately believes that plastic bags are for the environment what coal-fired power stations are for global warming.

The report found that banning plastic bags would be a waste of effort at high cost for little environmental pay-off. Many plastic bags were already recycled and used as rubbish bags, reducing the impact removing shopping bags would have on the waste stream. A small proportion of bags ended up as litter. And if litter was the problem, the report said, far better to deal with that directly. Green groups predictably responded to the Productivity Commission analysis with a barrage of counter-claims that, if they had read the report, had already been forensically demolished. Most revealing was the fact that claims that at least 100,000 animals were killed each year by plastic-bag litter were based on the misinterpretation of Canadian research on the impact of fishing nets. The Productivity Commission did not say it was a dumb idea to keep plastic bags out of waterways, just that banning all plastic shopping bags was not the best way to go about it.