The Mayor's Column
How difficult can it be for us to give up plastic bags at the supermarket?
Following recent announcements by China and now our new Federal Minister for the Environment, Peter Garrett, that plastic bags will be phased out in our respective countries this year, people are complaining vociferously. How will we pick up the doggie-do, how will we line our garbage bins? We won’t cope!
The fact is that Australians use four billion plastic bags a year, mostly from supermarkets, and they end up as landfill, or worse as litter, or even worse as killers of marine animals. The energy consumed in their production is enormous.
Anyone who has travelled in third world countries, where garbage is a bigger problem due to lack of finance and resources, understands that this is a global problem.
In rural Rajhastan takeaway food is served in unbaked clay pots, which are smashed and returned to the earth when used. A centuries old tradition of sustainability.
We Australians should be leading the way in reducing this wasteful reliance on plastic.
We hear that some plastic bags named “bio” are not truly biodegradable. The little black bags that councils provide in Doggy-Do bins are certainly biodegradable. Just leave an unused one in your pocket for a few weeks and see how it has reduced to a black powder. I think we can keep supplying those.
What did people do with household garbage before the ubiquitous plastic bag? They fed scraps to the chooks and composted. Council has great worm farms and compost bins at reasonable cost. Gardens will flourish. As a study showed that Mosman garbage is comprised of at least one-third foodstuff; we could recycle it much better than throwing wet stuff in the bin.
Many of us have been using reusable bags for some time. My favourites are the hand-woven billums I bought in Papua New Guinea. Now, those people know how to transport stuff, including pigs and their babies, in a good strong reusable bag!
Cr Denise Wilton, Mayor of Mosman
