Tasmania has 'baggsed' the moral high ground of bagging plastic bags into a ginormous plastic bag to eventually eject them from Australia's Apple Isle and its literal map of Tassie.

According to Australian Food News, Tasmania's Minister for the Environment, Parks and Heritage, David O'Byrne said that: 'The Government is committed to reducing the impact of lightweight plastic bags on the environment, addressing littering and to increasing resource recovery and recycling. We have listened to the community's concerns over these issues and they are telling us they want to see action.'

The article also quotes both Ben Kearney and John Dee, Founding Directors of the Do Something! organisation. The organisation is clearly named for 'action', even though sometimes the best action is no action.

However the 'Do Something!' people are action people who already worked hard to see a ban on plastic bags implemented in the Tasmanian city of Coles Bay, with Mr Kearney stating that he was 'pleased to hear the Minister's commitment to moving forward on this important issue and particularly pleased to see tripartisan support for a ban.'

Mr Kearney's co-founding colleague stated that: 'This move will enable Tasmania to resume its global leadership on this issue and it will significantly benefit our environment. The Coles Bay ban reduced plastic bag use by 1.8 million bags. When this statewide ban is introduced, it will result in significantly more plastic bags being removed from circulation'.

Although plastic bags are easily re-usable and can be stored in empty tissue boxes to serve as plastic bag dispensers, the sad reality is that most consumers do not dispose of plastic bags properly, and thus they become hazardous pollutants in streams, rivers, oceans, landfill and elsewhere.

 

Continued on page two, please read on!

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While plastic bags that could 'degrade' have popped up over the past few years, this clearly wasn't enough to stop the momentum over some wanting to get rid of plastic bags altogether, usually replacing them with those 'green' fabric bags that cost more than plastic bags to buy and now come in a trillion different colours.

There have been concerns expressed in the media that those 'green' bags need to be regularly washed so consumers aren't putting packets of frozen meat into bags one week, and then other fresh produce a week later (potentially resulting in bacterial contamination), but despite this concern there has been no reported outbreak of major illness or food poisoning en masse following the green fabric bag introduction.

Thus it would appear that the days of plastic bags are numbered, with the Australian state of South Australia already having banned them, and Australia's two territories, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory having done the same.

In NSW, some organisations have banned plastic bags, such as BP Petrol Stations, and while the lack of plastic bags is very annoying, alongside the option of paying 15c for a bag made of paper, you get used to it eventually and you either bring your own bag or carry your goods to the car, with purchases from petrol stations usually not requiring any shopping trolleys, nor will your car be parked very far at all from the petrol station's doors, as is the nature of, well, petrol stations.

So, while Tasmania has not yet officially banned plastic bags in its legislature, with competing sides of parliament needing to be on board to see bags bagged permanently from free distribution in retail stores, it now does look very likely to happen.

According to a Sydney Morning Herald report, the Australian Retailers Association said any ban wouldn't be a panacea, saying that only '0.6% of the litter stream' would be affected by the ban, and that 'of the 4.5 billion bags used by Australians each year, 75% were re-used.'

The battle over banning the bag continues, but they'll probably never succeed in banning the bagman.