Plastic bags are free, convenient, versatile, re-usable and through a voluntary program Australians apparently use nearly 50 percent less of them than we did three years ago.
But from 2009 you will need to pay for every plastic bag you take from a supermarket if you live in Victoria. Why? Because they are apparently a “as symbol of our inefficient use of resources”.
I've glean this information from an article in yesterday's The Australian entitled Plastic Bagging by their new environment reporter Matthew Warren.
The article also mentions that even with generous definitions of environmental hazard for plastic bags, the cost of imposing various bans on their use is about four times greater than the environmental benefit.
So why is the Victorian government going to ban their free distribution from 2009 and how are plastic bags a symbol of inefficient resource use?
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I’ve previously blogged on biodegradable plastic bags: https://climatelab.com.au/blog/archives/000993.html .
Marine pollution by plastic bags is a major problem.
Every dive trip I have been on I return to the boat with the pockets of my BCD full of plastic bag refuse collected during the dive and its the same if I am diving in the Red Sea or Sulawesi.
One example of how this refuse affects wildlife is that marine turtles often eat plastic bags mistaking them for the jellyfish which they predate on, these bags block the turtles gut and kill it.
If you are too lazy to carry a reusable bag (preferably un-bleached organic cotton) and too tight to pay for a biodegradable plastic one you will not get any sympathy from me.
Whinging on about cost / benefit ratios says it all.
All the studies show charging for plastic bags dramatically reduces their use and that means less litter, period.
Stephen - their method of estimating was a method allright, but one that is easily disputed.
In the end they do not estimate - they guess. They guessed the figure of $1 per plastic bag, and they guessed a value of clean up volunteers at $16/hour - now i don't know about you, but i don't spend every hour of my day working for $16 an hour. Thats because once i've made enough cash, my spare time and sleeping hours becomes extremely valuable, far more than $16 an hour. AFter working 5 days in the week, you'd need to pay me a lot lot more than $16 an hour to have me using up my spare time. Add to that that i think Clean up day is a great idea, but i've never participated, always been to busy or not found out about it and got organised. So the Allen method of using $16 an hour and clean up volunteers is just pub chatter.
And that is the problem i have with consultant reports like this - whats the points of paying tens of thousands of dollars to get a consulting firm to work out the cost benefit of a plastic bag ban using a complex economic model as the basis of the analysis, when they are simply guessing the environmental cost with a rudimentary comparison to clean up volunteers as a rough guide? Note they also did not attempt to estimate the social cost.
You quoted their costs and benefits to 3 and 4 significant figures just now. Tell me how many significant figures you think are appropriate when you are just guessing?
The Allen report provides the illusion of an analysis, when really all they do is calculate that is about a billion in costs, and a guess in benefits - they should have provided a range of possibilities, ie from $0 benefits (assuming like the market does that the environment has no value) up to well, a lot, maybe $10 billion (assuming the environment has high value).
In saying all this, i'm not saying i disagree. MAybe a bag ban is too expensive. I use green bags, because it is no trouble for me, but that's just me, i see that.
The reason i am debating here is because i do not think that the allen report is any better than the 'hair shirt greenism' you speak of. Their report is dressed up as rigourous analyis, but is really just an expensive guess. (They can pay me to guess next time, i'll charge half the price and call myself "Steve Consulting" using the MMRFBULLCR4P economic model that i developed myself).
The issue is muddied by values, as are many issues. Makes life tough for economists and PC commissions and consultants.
To illustrate: get the PC to do a cost benefit on the iraq war, or a cost benefit on banning stem cell research, or a cost benefit on removing snack machines from train stations, or on mandatory seat belts in cars or on having a movie classification system, or preventing sale of cigarettes to minors etc.
Your reference to the Allen report is also somewhat misleading - they do actually estimate the environmental benefits of plastic bag litter reduction based on revealed behaviour of clean up activity generously scaled up. Allen regards this as an overestimate of the benefits.
On that basis their estimate of the benefit of a total ban is $218m but with a cost of $1057 million.
When far more than 99% of this product doesn't cause the problem being addressed then surely a better policy than a ban should be pursued?
Steve
Plastic bags in the marine environment would have to be a lot, lot less than the 1% that gets in the total litter stream.
So I agree with the PC that no ban should be implemented until its benefits are clearly shown to be biggger than its costs.
There is no solid evidence that this is the case.
All we get from the pro-banners are anecdotes about marine damage and little evidence.
Attempts to analyse the impacts are always imperfect but they do guide the decision making process better than hair shirt greenism.
There are many techniques for putting a price on environemntal services (hedonic pricing, stated preferences (willingness to pay, willingness to accept), travel cost methods and so on). That said there is much debate on such results - but this and the thought processes that are gone through in undertaking the analysis is much better than no analysis at all - which is what the EPHC appeared to want to do in the first place.
Dear Steve
Perhaps you can suggest an objective source eg scientific studies of the impact of plastic bags of the environment in Australia. You have dismissed The Productivity Commision and Allen Consulting so who does muggins like me turn to?
Blair