Plastic Use in Australia

As you can see I'm getting a bit obsessive about plastic, LOL, but I think it's worth the extra attention, so I've been doing some more digging around about plastic use in Australia.

Plastic shopping bags are of course a big issue as over 3.9 BILLION plastic bags are used by Australians each year. That equates to 10 million a day, or 429,000 bags going into landfill every hour! Just 8.7 plastic checkout bags contain enough embodied petroleum energy to drive car 1 kilometre! There are many towns going plastic bag free, which is great, as only about 3% of bags are recycled and the rest end up in landfill. However plastic bags account for, on average, only 2% of the waste stream! Wow.

It's relatively easy to avoid plastic shopping bags though - we all take our own bags, don't we? - so my larger concern is with the rest of the plastic going into landfill.

So what's the deal with the biodegradable bags that are appearing everywhere now? There is an interesting article on biodegradable plastics ("bioplastics") at Science in the News, it is well worth the read. It says that: "In Australia around 1 million tonnes of plastic materials are produced each year and a further 587,000 tonnes are imported. Packaging is the largest market for plastics, accounting for over a third of the consumption of raw plastic materials."

They go on to talk about some of the biodegradable plastics available, including a bioplastic made from starch called PLA (polylactide), which has been commercially available since 1990, and is the bioplastic used in biodegradable plant pots (e.g. EnviroArc pots and Oasis seedlings) and so-called "green" disposable nappies (e.g. Babylove EcoBots). It is significantly more expensive than ordinary plastic though, around 2-10 times the cost, so it's use has been limited by manufacturers as most consumers don't want to pay the extra cost involved.

As I've mentioned before, there is some debate about whether bioplastics will break down at all in the anaerobic conditions of our landfills, and the article points out that simply substituting bioplastics for "old" plastics, won't save any space in our landfill. We need to alter the way we dispose of them, we need to treat them like compost. Organic contamination of recyclable plastics is a big problem at the moment (which is why we need to rinse our recycling), but they say that "by ensuring that biodegradable plastics are used to package all our organic produce, it may well be possible in the near future to set up large-scale composting lines in which packaging and the material it contains can be composted as one. The resulting compost could be channelled into plant production, which in turn might be redirected into growing the starch to produce more biodegradable plastics." That's an exciting concept, yeah? The Queensland sugar cane industry is also looking at getting into this area apparently, and the Australian company Plantic (the commercial offshoot of a bioplastics commonwealth research centre [CRC]), is making bioplastics from corn-based starch. In the meantime though, if you switch to using biodegradable bags, such as freezer bags and bin liners, if you can, make sure they go into the compost bin instead of landfill. In the light of that research actually, it seems that biodegradable bin liners are a waste of time and energy!

Also, beware of some bags that claim to be "degradable", but in fact just break down into smaller chunks of plastic - not a very useful solution! Truly biodegradable bags should be marked "compostable" or something along those lines, like these ones at Biome. They aren't cheap of course, but as I've mentioned before, I am having trouble finding a suitable substitute for freezer bags, so I was excited to find these ones, made in Australia no less, at Earth Basics. They are supposed to degrade in 30-40 days in a compost heap, and actually the price means that I will continue to look for alternatives instead of just substituting the new bags for my old ones :-) I'll let you know in future how they go in my compost heap.

What about packaging though? The PACIA (Plastics and Chemicals Industry Association) website says that "Plastic packaging is a particularly efficient method of preserving, transporting, storing, preparing and serving food and has contributed to a wide variety of packaging types to meet the increasing demands of modern, safe living. Trays, bags, tubs, bottles, films and seals extend the shelf life and prevent tampering of our food. Plastics are also one of the most energy and material efficient methods of packaging - they protect over 50% of the consumer goods yet account for only 16% of packaging by weight". Hence their extensive use, especially for food packaging. I have mentioned the National Packaging Covenant before, which commits signatories to "a national recycling target of 65% for packaging and no further increases in packaging waste disposed to landfill by the end of 2010". Signatories include the Australian Retailers Association and the Australian Food and Grocery Council, but I can't say that I've noticed much in the way of a reduction in plastic use, recently anyway? Although I did receive a delivery of goods from a "green" company recently that were packed in, what I thought were, the old foam beads, and was quite disgusted. Until I read the accompanying letter anyway, which pointed out that the "foam" was in fact a 100% biodegradable and compostable Australian wheat product (called "Green-Pak") made by a Victorian company, Pro-Pac. So there are definitely alternatives out there!

To be honest, in light of all this, it's becoming increasingly more obvious to me that I need to spending more time writing letters and emails (and less time blogging probably, lol) to companies requesting that they use alternatives to traditional plastics, including using bioplastics where other alternatives aren't available. So I'm off to do some research into who, what, where and when I should be writing - I'll let you know what I find.