Everyone knows that plastic bags are Bad, but if you’re a human being on Earth, even one with the purest intentions, you will know the unutterable disappointment in yourself that comes with arriving at the self-serve checkout and realising you haven’t brought your hessian grocery totes with you. Each rustle of the supermarket’s grey, disposable sacks is an accusatory hiss; you have betrayed the environment, your principles, and every sad-eyed sea turtle currently choking to death on a plastic scrap.
“You monster.”
But do you know what would prevent that crushing swoop in self-esteem from ever happening again? Banning plastic bags. It’s already happened in Italy, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and many other African nations, China, Bangladesh, a bunch of states in North America, as well as South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Now, Queensland is shaping up to be next to ban the bad bags, with 95% of Queenslanders polled saying that they’d support a total lightweight plastic bag ban.
(By lightweight plastic bags, the government means the disposable supermarket bags that you shove under the sink or in a dusty bag-holder and never use again, not the sturdier retail bags that Aldi make you pay 10c for.)
After posting a discussion paper online, the Queensland government received more than 26,000 submissions in response, with many residents expressing concerns about plastic bags’ impact on wildlife and the environment.
The government has indicated that it will introduce a bag-banning bill (sorry, I’m having fun here) in mid-2017, with the ban rolling out mid-2018. Wildlife Queensland campaigner Toby Hutcheon told the Brisbane Times that the response to the discussion paper was “astonishing“.
“And [it] really reinforces the fact that the state government has got it right in its decision to ban lightweight plastic bags.“We have both of the major political parties in the Queensland Parliament supporting this ban. So it’s very encouraging.”
Queenslanders currently use more than 900 million lightweight plastic bags every year, and the bags themselves take more than 1000 years to break down. If we ban ’em, that’s 900 million whispering voices of condemnation silenced, and you can go back to imagining every sea turtle with a mouthful of jellyfish, not garbage. Worth lugging those itchy hessian sacks to Coles every week? You betcha.
Source: Brisbane Times.
Image: American Beauty.
