Levy for plastic at the checkout not to be bagged

A Victorian trial shows recycling starts at the supermarket, explains Miriam Hechtman.

‘Do you want a plastic bag with that?” is not a question commonly asked in Australian supermarkets, but one that recently became obligatory during an Australian-first trial in which a levy was placed on plastic supermarket checkout bags. The results from the trial and subsequent actions have thrown the single-use plastic bag under the spotlight again and the debate to ban, levy or recycle it has been reignited.

“We know that less than 3 per cent of plastic bags are recycled each year, leaving almost 97 per cent of plastic bags taken at the checkout still in circulation,” says Clean Up Australia chairman Ian Kiernan.

“There is a simple solution: stop using them altogether. Communities across Australia have already taken action by banning plastic bags in their own towns and suburbs.”

In an effort to reduce the use of plastic shopping bags in supermarkets, the Victorian government and the Australian National Retailers Association (ANRA) agreed to trial the application of a 10¢ levy on single-use plastic bags in 17 participating supermarkets in Victoria last year.

More than $35,000 was raised throughout the trial for local environmental projects and the trial achieved a 79 per cent reduction in plastic bag use. Many shoppers chose alternative options including bags brought from home and the reusable “green bags”.

“Cutting the number of plastic bags going into landfill and the litter stream requires government, industry and the community to work together,” says Victoria’s Environment Minister Gavin Jennings.

“The trial has demonstrated that we can make big reductions in plastic bag use and that the retail industry is willing to work with government to help change community attitudes.”

ANRA chief executive Margy Osmond says the trial was an informative exercise. “It was an important thing for us to do, to be able to see how both consumers and others would respond, but it was more than just the consumer part of the puzzle. We needed to understand what would happen in the store, and certainly there was a fairly substantial increase in consumer concern and complaints.”

According to the KPMG independent report, 60 per cent of staff were concerned about the hygiene of reusable bags, 70 per cent said it took longer for the checkout as a result of having to discuss the bag or pack it in another bag, and 80 per cent said that they were often being asked to put more in a plastic bag than they would normally.

Osmond says overpacking a bag can also lead to further issues, such as the bag may split, fall, and break on the floor which can then become an Occupational Health and Safety concern for the supermarket.

“There are all sorts of different ramifications with this that need to be examined,” she says.

Though a bid to enforce a national levy was not adopted at the Environment Protection and Heritage Council (EPHC) meeting in November last year, Jennings says, “Victoria, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory will work to develop a proposal (to be considered at the next environment ministers meeting) for a national partnership with supermarkets to reduce plastic bag use, including a requirement that supermarkets that do not adopt strategies to reduce bag use, implement a price or ban on plastic bags.”

Environment Victoria executive director Kelly O’Shanassy says they are very disappointed with the EPHC’s decision not to proceed with a national levy.

“The Victorian trial showed that a 10¢ levy instantly slashed the use of plastic bags by 79 per cent. How much more evidence do governments need before they act? And how are we to resolve enormous problems like climate change if governments can’t even agree on reducing plastic bag use?”

O’Shanassy acknowledges there were teething problems during the trial “but nothing that you can’t overcome with a bit of training”.

Clean Up Australia estimates around 50 million bags enter the Australian litter stream each year. Recycling supermarket bags is an obvious option for consumers concerned about disposing of bags safely.

Visy Recycling has been running the “A small step to help the planet” grocery bag recycling program in conjunction with Coles, BI-LO and Kmart since December 2006. Once a week, 240-litre bins are collected by Visy from around 900 sites nationally, and then sent to be reprocessed.

National public affairs manager Geoff Potts highlights the importance of the program, saying they would like to see it expanded to as many sites as possible. “It’s important to collect these resources from the public and put them back into the recycling stream.”

Australian Council of Recyclers president John Lawson says: “The value of recycling plastic bags is not so much in the mass of material that they represent being recycled but that they are an icon of wastefulness of single-use materials and consumption.”