Ministry for the Environment is consulting on their proposed mandatory phase-out of single-use plastic shopping bags in New Zealand. Using our expertise in environmental footprinting, we share some thinking with you about choices, unintended consequences and best practice.
Life cycle assessments are a comprehensive environmental assessment of a product or service, covering all its life cycle steps. The MfE report has identified that single-use plastic shopping bags, (SUPSBs, which are under 35 microns thick) actually have a low environmental footprint compared to other bags. However, a Life Cycle Assessment approach generally does not take account of the matter of litter, particularly marine litter, which is a strong focus of the consultation paper.
A wide range of retailers give out free heavier-weight (35–70 microns thick) plastic shopping bags. Typically, these plastic shopping bags embody more resources and energy because of their heavier weight. Consumers would need to use these bags four to 12 times before they had less impact on climate change than the SUPSBs. They also have a litter impact on land and in water.
SUPSBs are an everyday item that can be replaced by accessible alternatives. But in changing your practices be aware of unintended consequences.
- Don’t substitute SUPSBs for other types of bag. For example, don’t buy kitchen bin liners as alternatives to using your old supermarket bags – the plastic is heavier and you only use them once.
- Don’t use bags made of materials that are currently not able to be recycled. For example, avoid the use of polypropylene bags.
- Potential life-cycle environmental benefits from other forms of bags are compromised where they are not reused many times. SUPSBs are estimated to provide the overall lowest environmental impacts if recommended reuse rates of other bags were not followed.
- Don’t think the problem of plastic waste is solved by banning SUPSBs. These are a small subset of all the sources of land and marine plastics.
We would like to see NZ focus more on developing product stewardship and recycling programmes as we have discussed in a previous newsletter. Because used plastic bags have a low market value, most kerbside recycling collection schemes do not offer plastic bag recycling. The Packaging Forum’s Soft Plastics Recycling project targets the full range of post-consumer soft plastics including single-use plastic shopping bags. Its target is to achieve a 10 per cent recycling rate this year and a 35 per cent recycling rate by 2024. You may have seen these bins at your supermarket. Some of these soft plastics are being recycled in Australia but most are being stored while the scheme is exploring local recycling options.
As we discussed in our May newsletter domestic recycling of plastics is good at 71%, business recycling of plastics is poor at 4%. A particular issue is the 90,000 tonnes of difficult to recycle plastic like polypropylene and non-reusable plastic like PVC which are mostly going to landfill.
Whilst SUPSBs are topical we favour a more strategic approach to the issues of waste in NZ. Typically, when we work with clients looking at reporting on their environmental performance we would use a best practice approach. We would look at:
- Strategy -the current sustainability framework and strategy, and the process that went into developing it
- Materiality- the strategy’s focus areas (“material topics”) and how these were selected
- The company’s stakeholders and their involvement in developing the framework and identifying material topics
- Gaps in information and practice
- Systems to integrate the framework and strategy throughout the organisation
- Programmes and projects underway and in the pipeline, with consideration to targets and timeframes.
SUPSBs may be emblematic of the problem, but they are just the tip of the iceberg and you cannot ban everything. A more strategic, material and educational approach is required for NZ.
Submissions to the consultation paper close at 5.00 pm on Friday 14 September 2018.