Editor, The News:
Re: B.C. VIEWS: Plastic garbage in, garbage out.
The arguments Tom Fletcher uses to reject a ban on plastic shopping bags are unfortunately misleading and out of the context of our situation here in B.C.
For starters, he refers to a Danish study that compares the pros and cons of plastic bags to other options in a country where incineration (waste to energy) is standard. There, when garbage (including plastic bags) is thrown away, it is burned in waste-to-energy facilities and does not leave a lasting physical impact on the environment. It instead becomes a fuel source.
In B.C., there is only one such facility, in Burnaby, and it burns a tiny fraction of all the garbage produced across this province. The vast majority of plastic shopping bags here reach their ‘end of life’ at the landfill, not at a waste to energy facility.
They are not collected in curbside recycling programs, they are not recycled into new plastic items, they are not burned to produce energy, and they take decades to decompose at the dump.
As well, if shopping bag plastic was worth more than steel before, it isn’t anymore. Ask any plastic recycling company in B.C. and it will tell you that, in fact, current industry conditions mean that plastic film of such poor grade as shopping bags, with their high level of contamination, too, is not wanted by end-users or manufacturers in China, where most of the plastic collected through recycling here is shipped.
Bales of plastic shopping bags are worth only a fraction of what they were before, if they are worth anything at all. So many North American cities are struggling to find end-markets for plastic they collect through recycling programs and have no choice but to landfill it instead right now.
Lastly, many people support banning plastic bags not only because so much of that plastic ends up in the garbage, but because so much of the litter on the ground and in our waterways is plastic bags. I agree, the volume of it here compared to the top 10 such polluting rivers in the world is not nearly as high. But isn’t it better to do what we can to minimize our negative impact on the environment if we know how?
Didn’t we survive without plastic bags before and could the push to eliminate them spur innovation to create a better replacement or changes to our shopping habits?
The Mr.Trash Wheel in Baltimore, for example, is a fantastic example of innovation that helps deal with the problem of garbage in our waterways.
According to the baltimorewaterfront.com website, since May 2014, Mr. Trash Wheel has collected 1,518,620 pounds of garbage floating down the Jones Falls River. Among much other garbage, in four years from only one river, it collected 522,603 plastic shopping bags.
Terryl Plotnikoff
Maple Ridge