MALAYSIA’s campaigns to limit the use of plastic bags seems like a good idea. Plastic takes decades to decompose, pollute the environment and endanger marine life.
But, how effective are these camp aigns? To determine their effectiveness, we need to ask several questions.
For instance, how much plastic waste does our country produce? Malaysia is unfortunately the 8th largest producer in the world in mismanaged plastic wastes.
Thirteen per cent of Malaysia’s solid wastes are plastics, of which 55 per cent are mismanaged. In 2010, Malaysia produced 0.94 million tonnes of plastic waste, but how much of these are from plastic bags?
Unfortunately, no rigorous study has been conducted to determine this — or even how many plastic bags Malaysians use annually.
For the latter, estimates do exist, but they vary, swinging from nine to 22 to even a whopping 55 billion plastic bags per year. The problem with Malaysia’s estimates is that most of them, if not all, were derived from observations at supermarkets.
It turns out that there is a linear relationship, albeit a weak one, between a country’s economic status and the number of plastic bags used. Using this, it is estimated that we use about three billion plastic bags a year.
Taking the maximum weight of a plastic shopping bag as 7g means three billion shopping bags would weigh 21,000 tonnes.
With our country’s 0.94 million tonnes of mismanaged plastic wastes, this means even if we completely stopped using plastic bags, we would have only reduced our plastic waste by two per cent.
A 2011 Housing and Local Government Ministry report recommended the following for greater plastic wastes management:
1) more tax incentives be given for companies that undertake waste recycling management;
2) members of the public be given rewards and redemption for turning in recyclable plastics;
3) companies should be encouraged to buy back their plastics;
4) recycling infrastructure in the country should be improved; and,
5) more innovation on the reuse of plastics.
Limiting the use of plastic shopping bags is a good start, but alone, it is a grossly inadequate strategy. Cliched as it may be, our strategy is simply this: reduce, reuse and recycle not just plastic bags but all plastics.
CHRISTOPHER TEH,
Department of Land Management, Faculty of Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia