The Plastic Bag Dilemma

"There is no solution in sight for the plastic bag menace as the material is still freely issued, then carelessly discarded, each day"-So says Hilary Chiew in the Startwo on 25th February, 2009.

How can there be a solution when everyone simply thinks that he is not responsible. There are signs at the hyperstore and supermarkets for customers to reduce the use of plastic bags but the cashiers are not told to remind them on checking out. In fact the tellers dish out the bags so generously to separate the wet purchases from the dry ones, often wasting the bags.

If these stores were to collect unused or usable bags upon entry at the store and give out a credit note that could be accumulated and later used as a discount upon payment of the purchases at check out, I think the problem of plastic bags could be solved. Everyone wants to be rewarded for a certain deed. So giving a token reward for returning usable bags would definitely go a long way. The stores should also train their front end personnel to save the environment too. Some form of compensation should be given to them as well as in the practice of awarding the best employee of the month award for selling the most mobile reload for the month. The campaign should be on a long term basis instead of on an ad-hoc basis as usually done for environmental issues.

Tesco has a Green Clubcard reward programme for using the green bag brought from home, but it is not being publicised enough. It is also inconvenient to bring so many bags from home if you want to shop one whole month of groceries. That's why the "No Plastic Bag Campaign" can only succeed in pharmacies, because you don't buy a cartload of goods at a pharmacy.

Plastic bag manufacturers maintain that it is not the bags that pose a problem but what consumers do with them. The plastic bag industry would certainly not support a programme to reduce plastic bag usage as the industry in Malaysia amounts to RM1.6 bilion, 20% of which caters for the domestic market (RM360 million).

So it is up to the customers, the retailers and Municipal Solid Waste Managers with the support from the ruling government, to devise a scheme to stop the landfills from being completely degraded by the plastics. The official statistics show that plastics constitute 24% of the landfill volume, second after food waste.

Imagine how much land is saved from being converted to a landfill if all households, hotels, restaurants, canteens, grocery stores and wet markets were to recycle their plastics and turn all their perishable and food wastes to compost.