What Is The Plastic Bag Ban?
The Waste Minimisation (Plastic Shopping Bags) Regulations 2018 took effect on 1 July 2019. From this date retailers can no longer sell or distribute single-use plastic shopping bags to customers for the purpose of carrying or distributing their sold goods.
The regulations were approved and announced in December 2018. This gave businesses a six month period, until 1 July 2019, to transition away from plastic bags. From 1 July 2019 businesses cannot sell or provide single-use plastic shopping bags to customers for the purpose of carrying or distributing their sold goods1.
What Happened After The Plastic Bag Ban?
While supermarkets seemed to have plenty of time to use up the remaining plastic bags, then continued to do so right up to the date of the ban. This meant that there was some plastic waste generated at the start of the ban where plastic bags had been created, not used, then thrown away (As a dog owner I personally benefited from this as I was gifted a large pack of plastic bags that could no longer be issued by the supermarket).
After the ban was in place, most retailers honored the ban, including all major supermarkets. However, supermarket’s initial reaction to the ban was to create plastic bags that used much more plastic than the disposable ones, calling them reusable bags and selling them for a small fee.
Some time after the ban, supermarkets eventually moved away from selling multi-use plastic bags in favour of selling cheap fabric bags (which currently retail for $1). Such bags are still made from plastic (though they don’t feel like it), though the plastic that’s used is Polypropylene (PP) which PP plastic is highly recyclable2.
Many supermarkets have since retained single use bags, but these are available as paper bags, which are currently (at the time of writing) sell for $0.15 each, which is very affordable. There have been periods where some supermarkets appear to have struggled with their suppliers and have had shortages and also had to use alternative paper bags, sometimes without handles.
Opinion
I was frustrated about this at the time of the ban because supermarkets simply replaced the bags that were useful for dog owners with bags that used more plastic and were too thick to use. Also there are other places in supermarkets where plastic waste is greater and less useful, however upon reflection and with some time passing, I think this has been a moderately successful policy because it appears that the small $1 cost is enough to make people mostly reuse their PP bags (tee-hee… ‘PP bag’).
However it’s important to note that while PP plastic is recyclable, a lot of it doesn’t get recycled. Given this, the life of all PP plastic (no matter how many times it’s recycled, up-cycled or reused) will eventually end in landfill. One source suggests that the current reusable plastic fabric bags are used about 11 times more than the old single use bags3.
Therefore this policy is looks to me like an improvement on the prior plastic situation, but isn’t solving the plastic problem, or even part of the problem.
Addendum: To clarify: while I don’t think the policy is a complete success, I do like that it’s an improvement. I also think that the 6 months that were given to source alternatives, seemed to be sufficient for the market to react and not be caught out. Years later, supply of appropriate bags seems to have settled and we now have decent single-use paper options (which now reliably come with handles), alongside other options.