London joins national campaign to banish the curse of the plastic bag

 By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent

Published: 14 November 2007

 

British shops hand out a staggering 13 billion every year. But after a decision by 33 London councils yesterday, plastic bags could be soon be consigned to history, unmourned by anyone who cares about cleaning up the environment.

Eighty villages, towns and cities, including Brighton and Bath, have introduced or are considering a ban on them since shops in the Devon market town of Modbury went “plastic bag- free”. But yesterday represented the most significant move yet. The capital is now on board.

All 33 authorities in the London Councils group voted for legislation to prevent shops in the capital handing out free plastic bags. In the next fortnight Westminster Council will present a private Bill to the House of Commons which would apply to every London shop from the humblest newsagent to Harrods.

Shoppers clutching large numbers of bags in London’s West End could become a thing of the past; instead they will be asked to use sturdy reusable plastic “bags for life” or cotton or string hold-alls. London’s authorities said they needed to halt the environmental damage done by plastic bags, which use oil and landfill space and kill marine wildlife.

The ban is likely to be opposed by big retailers such as Tesco which prefer encouragement rather than coercion to change behaviour. But campaigners point to international trailblazers that have already banned the bags, places as diverse as Tasmania and Tanzania, which this year were joined by Paris and San Francisco. London would be the biggest urban centre yet to take the plunge.

Peter Robinson, director of Waste Watch, said: “We’ve seen successful action taken on carrier bags all across the world from Australia to Zanzibar, and now it’s time for London to take a lead on this issue in the UK.”

Although the London ban could take years to come into force, the groundswell of opposition to free disposable bags is unmistakable – and perhaps unstoppable. Major retailers have signed an agreement with the Government’s waste body, Wrap, to reduce the environmental impact of plastic bag use by 25 per cent by the end of next year. They are making the bags more lightweight, exploring biodegradable options, and discouraging their routine distribution.

Tesco says it has cut its use of carrier bags by 1 billion to 3 billion after a high-profile campaign to give loyalty points to shoppers reusing them. Today Sainsbury’s will announce in its financial results that it has cut plastic bag use by 10 per cent as a result of having signs at the checkouts asking shoppers to consider the environment and promoting jute and cotton bags. Marks & Spencer is to chargeshoppers 5p a plastic bag after a trial in Northern Ireland that cut the number handed out by 66 per cent.

The Government says it is monitoring the efforts in commerce, but is set against a plastic bag tax of the kind introduced five years ago in Ireland, where the number of carrier bags has fallen by 90 per cent. Officials claim there is evidence that Irish shoppers are using other types of plastic instead. The plastic revolution was started by a BBC camerawoman, Rebecca Hosking, from Modbury, after she had seen the deaths of albatross chicks that had eaten plastic. In the absence of government action, 43 traders in the town decided to start their own “plastic bag-free town” in May. The shops refused to give out free plastic bags, charging 5p for a cornstarch bag, 10p for a paper one or £1.50 for a cotton carrier.

Trade did not fall off, and the six-month experiment proved so successful that Modbury has made the change permanentand made the carrying of a plastic bag an antisocial activity.

Other towns such as Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire and Overton in Hampshire have followed suit, and the idea of going “plastic bag-free” is taking hold elsewhere, such as in Brighton, where councillors last month called on the city’s retailers to stop giving out bags.

The plastics industry insisted that such bans were environmentally harmful, arguing that re-use of plastic bags – to line bins, wrap packed lunches and scoop up dogs’ mess – made them more environmentally friendly than cotton alternatives, and that the oil used to make the HDPE (high density polyethylene) bags came from a by-product of oil.

Nonetheless, the industry says that unnecessary use of bags is a problem, and is calling on shoppers to consider whether they really need them. Peter Woodall, of the Packaging and Industrial Films Association, said: “We are losing the battle in terms of hearts and minds of the public, who now certainly believe that the plastic bag is a hazard to health and the environment and something we need to eradicate from society.”

Ms Hosking, who started the Modbury experiment, said that plastic bags were the start of a campaign against disposable consumer culture. “It’s our consumption of everything – whether it’s petrol, water or consumer goods – that is driving virtually every environmental problem on the planet and it needs to stop. We have shown that individual people can make a difference,” she said.

A local convenience, a global problem

Anyone who has seen The Graduate, one of the great movie classics, will remember vividly the single-word piece of advice that Dustin Hoffman’s confused young career-hopeful, Benjamin Braddock, receives from a well-meaning family friend: Plastics.

Asked to clarify what exactly he means, the family friend, Mr McGuire, explains: “There’s a great future in plastics.” And in 1967, when the film was made, no doubt there was.

Unfortunately, in the succeeding years, many aspects of what then seemed to be those oh-so-convenient, revolutionary, synthetic materials have come to appear not a blessing but a curse – and plastic bags are high on the list.

The trouble with them is that they have the vices of their virtues. They are incredibly cheap and light, and so are produced in astronomical, scarcely credible, numbers; and remarkably tough for their lightness, they are incredibly persistent in the environment once we have finished with them.

Nobody knows exactly how many plastic bags are consumed annually worldwide, but a good estimate is between 500 billion and 1,000 billion, which comes out at more than a million a minute – and then they’re all thrown away. But as they do not biodegrade, huge numbers don’t disappear. They have become the most ubiquitous item of litter. They are the icons of the throwaway society.

In parts of Africa, there are so many blowing through the bush that a cottage industry has sprung up in harvesting windblown bags and using them to weave hats, or even more bags.

But in some parts of the environment, they represent a lethal threat to wildlife, in particular in the oceans. According to the British Antarctic Survey, they have spread from Spitzbergen north of the Arctic Circle to the Falkland Islands at the other end of the globe.

When floating they can resemble jellyfish, and so are often mistakenly eaten by sea turtles and other marine mammals and birds, with fatal results.

No one denies plastic bags are satisfyingly convenient. But as Billy Joel sang, you pay for your satisfaction somewhere along the line.

Michael McCarthy

Source: The Independent.

Lights out for traditional bulbs by 2012

• John Vidal, environment editor
• The Guardian
• Friday September 28 2007

The plug will be pulled on nearly all conventional lightbulbs after supermarkets and energy suppliers agreed to gradually phase out incandescent bulbs from next year, the government said yesterday.

The initiative, announced by environment secretary Hilary Benn in Bournemouth, is expected to save 5m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and be completed by 2012.

The old lightbulbs are being rapidly replaced by low-energy bulbs, which cost more to buy but last up to 12 times as long and use nearly 80% less electricity.

But the government’s voluntary initiative was criticised by environmental groups and other political parties, who argued that it was weak compared with initiatives in other countries. Australia has banned conventional bulbs beyond 2009.

Yesterday many stores said they were in favour. Currys has agreed to stop selling the bulbs by the end of this year, Habitat by 2009, Woolworths, the Co-op, Asda, Morrison’s, and Sainsbury’s by 2010, and Tesco by 2011. Only Somerfield has declined to give a date for a complete phase-out.

Greenpeace director John Sauven said: “The government needs to go further and introduce tough mandatory efficiency standards rather than relying on weak voluntary initiatives. For every year of delay in getting rid of these bulbs, 5m tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere unnecessarily.”

Opposition parties urged the government to go further. “New standards should also seek to phase out stand-by. Instead, the EU has just announced an anti-dumping tariff on imports of energy-saving bulbs from China which will make them more expensive,” said Chris Huhne, the Lib Dems’ environment spokesman.

From:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/sep/28/energyefficiency.ethicalliving

Milk

How nestle is taking advantage of the poor

Dengue fever spreading in Texas

September 19, 2007 | Posted by John Balbus in News

The author of today’s post, John Balbus, M.D., M.P.H., is Chief Health Scientist at Environmental Defense.

In the past when I gave talks about dengue fever, I’d say it was a problem in Mexico, but relatively rare over the border in Texas. I need to update my slides. Following an outbreak of dengue fever in Brownsville, Texas, health investigators found that 38 percent of the town was at risk for the most dangerous form of the illness.

This is a big deal, and global warming may well play a role.

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne viral illness found in tropical and subtropical regions. The most dangerous form is dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), which results from a second infection in someone previously infected. DHF involves low platelet counts and bleeding, and can lead to shock and death.

In 2005 there were 25 hospital cases of dengue fever in Brownsville, Texas, and 16 of these were DHF. The 16 people with DHF must have previously contracted dengue fever, possibly without realizing it.

Since people with good underlying health may not have symptoms with a first infection, health investigators from the Center for Disease Control screened residents’ blood for past infection. Disturbingly, they found that 38 percent of Brownsville residents had antibodies to dengue virus. All these people are at risk for DHF. This is not good news, to say the least.

Is the spread of dengue fever in Texas due to climate change? It’s impossible to say for sure, but right now dengue fever is partly kept in check by low winter temperatures in Texas that kill the mosquitoes. Unusually warm winters associated with changing climate could lead to more severe outbreaks in the future. And with few specific treatments available, people in Texas will need to remove breeding places for mosquitoes to keep the dengue at bay.

From: Enviromental Defense.

Have you got green fatigue?

You recycle and buy local – but the earth’s still warming and the ice cap’s still melting. If you’re starting to feel apathy creeping in, you’re not the only one. Hugh Wilson reports

Published: 20 September 2007

Recent environmental messages have made such an impact on a friend of mine that, a couple of weeks ago, he broke a four-year prohibition and walked back into Burger King. “Intensive beef production, clone town Britain, just so much blah,” he said, by way of explanation. “Nobody else really seems to be doing much about it, so why should I bother?”

My friend is the embodiment of one of the great fears of the environmental lobby. Fifteen years ago, the term “compassion fatigue” indicated a general disillusionment with fund-raising concerts and famine appeals. The cause was too hopeless, governments too apathetic, and individuals too impotent. Slowly, and for similar reasons, the term “green fatigue” has started to creep into the dinner-party conversations of the composting classes.

And, if anything, with more reason. Environmental campaigners worry that individuals see their actions as largely irrelevant when set against the enormity of global climate change. While famine appeals parade a simple, striking message – send a tenner, save a child – no such easy cause and effect exists for global warming. By contrast, the solutions to climate change seem hugely complex and controversial.

“The problems we face are of a magnitude no one has seen in at least two generations,” says Alex Steffen, the executive editor of WorldChanging, a website and book that promote innovative solutions for sustainable living. “The scale of the actions people are being told to take by green consumerism groups and businesses, on the other hand, are so small as to seem meaningless. I think that more and more people see this widening gulf and lose hope.”

And if we’re not all losing hope just yet, many of us are becoming increasingly cynical. To campaigners, that’s not surprising. As Steffen suggests, businesses have turned environmentalism into a marketing strategy. A new term, “green-washing”, describes companies that paint a superficial green gloss on conventional business practices. When firms such as BP and Wal-Mart parade their environmentally friendly credentials, scepticism is not only inevitable, says Steffen, it’s “a necessary antidote”.

At least the green lobby can count on celebrities to spread the message. Unfortunately, the message too often seems to be, “do as I say, not as I do”. Celebrity is an intrinsically unsustainable condition. The reaction to the Live Earth concerts – which prompted as much debate on the carbon footprint of the A-listers who’d been chauffeured in for the occasion as the campaign they were there to endorse – showed the insidious spread of green fatigue.

It could have been worse. In the States, Sheryl Crow’s “Stop Global Warming College Tour” was panned for stipulating parking for three tractor-trailers, four buses and six cars. John Travolta recently urged the British public to “do their bit” to combat global warming after flying in on his private Boeing 707, and got trounced in the press for his efforts. None of this is likely to keep the public on side in the long run – and countering climate change is likely to be a very long run indeed.

Even the pronouncements of more committed celebrities can seem, well, a little misjudged. A new book, edited by the socialite and former model Sheherazade Goldsmith, the wife of the Ecologist editor Zac, advises concerned greens to keep geese and make their own goat’s cheese. As my sceptical friend said: “The goose can stay on the balcony, but I doubt you’d call it free-range.”

Of course, many celebrities and businesses now offset their carbon emissions by paying for trees to be planted in sustainable forests or investments made in green energy projects. But “magic bullet” solutions to climate change are quickly losing their sheen. Recent investigations – including a widely trailed Dispatches programme on Channel 4 – question the effectiveness of carbon offsetting and suggest that it might even be counterproductive.

Some environmentalists worry that carbon offsetting promotes the idea that if you throw a few quid at the problem you can carry on as normal. According to Michael R Solomon, the author of Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having and Being: “Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioural change. We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”

Unfortunately, most environmentalists agree that altering our routines quite fundamentally is the only real way to save the planet. Meanwhile, another “magic bullet” solution – and one that would also allow many of us to carry on pretty much as normal – is coming in for unexpected criticism: a recent study has suggested that any widespread uptake of biofuels in Europe could decimate Asian rainforests.

What all this adds up to, experts fear, is a recipe for disillusionment and – eventually – disengagement. Psychologically, we’re primed to walk away from problems that are too complex to understand and too difficult to solve, and we’ll break into a run if we think cynical marketers and self-publicising celebrities are jumping on a green bandwagon. And green campaigners who think a deluge of apocalyptic information will cut through our cynicism are probably mistaken.

“In an information-filled world, people screen heavily what new information they let in, and I suspect that the run-of-the-mill global-warming story is just not crossing the threshold,” says the climate scientist Dr Susanne Moser, the co-author of Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change. By run-of-the-mill, she means those all-too-familiar stories about melting ice shelves or endangered species. “Thinking about a global, complex, challenging, and potentially very dangerous and disastrous thing and not knowing what to do about it makes us go numb or into denial.”

The antidote to numbness and denial is a sense of progress, of things getting better. But in the fight against climate change, progress is hard to come by. Moser uses the analogy of a diet. How long would you stay on a diet that demanded stringent effort over a prolonged period and promised only that that your weight gain might slow down a bit? Let’s face it, it wouldn’t make the cover of Grazia.

She also admits that “we have terribly failed our audience” by focusing on apocalyptic scenarios and complex science. Instead, one key factor in keeping people enthused in the fight against climate change will be local, collective action, she says.

“Why do people go to Alcoholics Anonymous, or to Weight Watchers? Because in a group of like-minded people they have the support, accountability, peer pressure and the shared experience of others to help make the change. They also have opportunities to come together, check on progress, and get support around setbacks. That’s what we need for climate change – to recover from our fuel addiction.”

Progress on a small and local scale – such as saving a beloved local shop, voting in a councillor who will push green issues, or increasing local recycling rates – and even a desire to keep up with the Joneses (“if everybody’s ditching the gas-guzzler, I’ll do it, too”) are far more effective motivators than media-inspired guilt and vague fears of an uncertain future, she adds.

Alex Steffen also believes in the need for a local, community focus. But he says that we need to be honest about the scale of the changes that have to be made, and to counter green fatigue by imbuing the fight against climate change with an almost heroic spirit.

“I don’t think we need to sugar-coat the challenges we face,” he says. “We just need to ask people to rise to their real potential, and see that this is our moment for greatness. If we create a sustainable future for everyone, it will be an accomplishment as great as winning the Second World War.

“Many environmentalists assume people won’t do anything more than small steps, and hope those small steps will build the political will for more substantive changes. But history has shown a thousand times that “regular” people are capable of extraordinary courage, dedication and ingenuity when asked to answer the call. It’s time we put out that call, rather than another marketing pitch.”

The small actions that can make a big difference

* You’ve heard it before, but changing to energy-efficient light bulbs really can make a difference. Lighting uses 20 per cent of the world’s electricity, the equivalent of burning 600,000 tons of coal a day. Phasing out old bulbs would avoid the release of 700 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.

* Shop local. If your food shopping amounts to £100 a week, that’s £5,200 a year that could be going into the pocket of a local butcher, grocer and baker, rather than the supermarket till. Imagine if 100 people in your area had the same idea.

* Is recycling really worth it? Yes. Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours. Glass can be reused an infinite number of times. Think of all the jars recycled in your street in a year.

* Recycling a ton of paper saves 17 trees and 7,000 gallons of water.

* Turning your thermostat down by two degrees can save 2,000 pounds of carbon every year. Just imagine if everyone in your family and everyone in your office did it.

From: The Independent.