Left Holding the… (1)

Another article regarding ‘plastic bags’.

Fuel for the fire!

Andrew Bolt says in his column: 

“Plastic Bags choke Garrett” 

IF plastic shopping bags really are so bad, why must Peter Garrett make up so many fake excuses to ban them?

Here we go again – another green crusade in which facts are invented to scare you into doing something dumb.

This time our evangelical Environment Minister says he’ll this year take away your plastic shopping bags – the ones that are so useful that we use more than 4 billion of them each year to cart home our shopping.

What must we use instead to carry home the fortnightly shopping: suitcases? Rolls of green bin liners?

And how annoying not to have those plastic bags to reuse for everything from wrapping leftovers and wet clothes to picking up manure.

In fact, I could use one right now to hold the manure Garrett has used to justify this feel-good ban that will cost us millions and gain us zip.

Let me demonstrate, by fact-checking some of the claims Garrett has made to justify his ban.

Garrett claim #1:

“I think everybody agrees that having 4 billion plastic bags floating around Australia’s environment is not desirable.”

Pardon? We have 4 billion bags just floating around as if tossed out of a window? In fact, the Productivity Commission in 2006 reported that of the 4 billion shopping bags we use each year, just 0.8 per cent becomes litter.

The rest are buried in landfill, recycled or reused, and aren’t “floating” anywhere.

And how handy those bags are even when buried.

The Commission marvelled: “It appears that plastic bags may have some landfill management benefits including stabilising qualities, leachate minimisation and minimising greenhouse gas emissions.”

You really want some litter to clean up, Peter? Crack down instead on those billions of foul cigarette stubs.

Garrett claim #2:

“I remember that incredible story about a whale, I think it was beached somewhere in France, and it had 800 kilos worth of plastic bags and rubbish inside it, when they opened it up.”

Wow, a whale that can fit almost a tonne of plastic bags in its stomach must be so gargantuan as to make Moby Dick seem a tadpole.

But lets peer more closely into the gut of Garrett’s giga-whale, which washed up on a beach in Normandy in 2002, and count all those shopping bags found inside by researchers from the University of Caen.

Here we go: One, two . . . Er, two.

Two. Yes, that’s Garrett’s incredible 800kg of plastic bags. Oh, and then there was that other unspecified “rubbish” he mentioned: two English plastic-and-foil crisp packets, seven bin liners, bits of seven transparent plastic bags and one food container.

Total wet weight: 800 grams, not Garrett’s 800kg.

Conclusion: Ban bin liners instead.

Garrett claim #3:

“There are some 4 billion of these plastic bags floating around . . . ending up affecting our wildlife . . .”

Here Garrett refers to the greatest hoax of all – those endless claims that a Newfoundland study found plastic bags killed more than 100,000 marine mammals every year.

This claim – originally made by environmental consultants Nolan-ITU in a report commissioned by the then Howard government – was accepted as true by a credulous Senate environment committee inquiry in 2002, and has been hyped ever since by green groups such as Planet Ark.

South Australia’s Labor Government even peddles the claim today on its Zero Waste website to justify its own planned ban on bags.

Small problem: the claim is completely false. As Nolan-ITU belatedly admitted four years later, it had misread that Newfoundland study, which actually said 100,000 animals might be killed – or injured – by discarded fishing nets and lines, and not by plastic bags, which it hadn’t mentioned at all.

Conclusion: Ban fishing nets instead.

Yet how fast that fake story of the mammal-choking bags raced around the world.

The reason so many green campaigners greedily repeated it was that no other study has to this day linked plastic bags to widespread animal deaths, no matter how hard those little Garretts looked for proof.

And, my, how hard they did look. Judge that by Planet Ark’s founder, Jon Dee, who two years ago claimed he’d been “inundated” with calls from farmers whose calves had died after grazing on plastic bags. In fact, the National Farmers Federation last week said it knew of no such thing.

Judge it also by Clean Up Australia’s Ian Kiernan, who claimed a Bryde’s whale found dead near Cairns had in its stomach “33 different items made up mainly of plastic bags”.

In fact, as that Senate inquiry was told, most of the plastic in the whale’s gut comprised food packages, bait bags, fragments of garbage bags and three large sheets of plastic.

Enough! How many more times must we have green campaigners puff up their causes with scares, wild claims, half-truths and exaggerations?

That’s the culture of hype that’s produced Garrett himself – with his claim, for instance, that the Chernobyl nuclear accident “caused the deaths of more than 30,000 people”, when the true figure is about 50.

It’s this kind of scaremongering – now seen with global warming – that dismays even a Greenpeace marine biologist in Britain, David Santillo.

“It’s very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags,” he said last week. “It doesn’t do the Government’s case any favours if you’ve got statements being made that aren’t supported by the scientific literature that’s out there.”

So what does that scientific literature actually say?

Fact: Ban these bags and people will probably switch to stuff even worse for the environment, such as paper bags, said the Productivity Commission.

A study by Allen Consulting agreed, adding that it took five times more greenhouse gases to make paper bags than it did plastic ones.

Fact: Switching to biodegradable plastic bags could be worse still, said the 2002 Nolan-ITU report. People would probably litter more, thinking it didn’t matter, and their bags would release chemicals in breaking down.

Fact: People love plastic bags too much to give them up even if made to pay. Ask Ireland, which imposed a levy on bags only to find more than ever were being used, with only a small cut in the number turning up as litter.

And the Productivity Commission warned a levy or ban wouldn’t work any better here: “A cost-benefit study commissioned by the governments shows that the benefits of a phase out or a per-unit charge would be significantly outweighed by the costs.”

It concluded: “A more cost-effective approach would be to target littering directly.”

How about that? Just hit the naughty litterer, not the struggling shopper, the food-wrapping clean fiend and the civic pooper-scooper.

But think such reason works against the religious green zeal of Old Testament types like Garrett? No, their hatred of the bag comes from a place that mere facts cannot reach.

If plastic bags were used only to gather morning dew and wild berries, no green would rage against them as they rage now. But they are instead the ultimate symbol of wicked capitalism – a product made by oil and used to carry home factory-made goodies from bulging shops.

No wonder they must be banned, and let us choke on that, we loathsome mammals of the mall.

Join Andrew on blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt