Say No to Plastics

Yesterday, The Malaysian Insider was told by Selangor executive councilor Elizabeth Wong (left) that the state’s plastic bag policy was “an issue of waste”.

Selangor has a “No Plastic Bag Day” policy, which bans free plastic bags on Saturdays, and this is supposedly causing unhappiness among the citizenry. The same news report had mentioned that hypermarkets and retail shops in the country’s wealthiest state claim to be suffering from business declines of up to 30 percent on Saturdays since Khalid Ibrahim’s administration implemented the policy in January this year. And for those insisting to use a plastic bag on that day, Selangor charges 20 sen per plastic bag.

Already, Wong had announced this week that Selangor would extend the anti-plastic bag policy by another day, i.e. Sunday, with effect from January 2011.

During the state assembly sitting on Thursday, Wong stressed that the government’s aim was to reduce usage of plastic bags, but not to eradicate it. “We’re not running a campaign to ban, or stop the usage of plastic bags, but to show users that plastic bags have their value. It’s not free or gratis. The basis of plastic bags is petrochemical which is a limited resource”, she said.

In Penang, the “No Plastic Bag Day” policy would be enforced every day starting from January 1 next year, announced the state’s Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng when he tabled the 2011 Budget at the state assembly. The Penang ruling is already seeing opposition from the public.

There have been attempts by critics to dismiss plastic bags as a threat to the environment, pointing out that anti-plastic bag campaigns are based on exaggerated claims and flawed science. But if we actually take the trouble to check out the Greenpeace website at http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/ – and which I did today – we will have to acknowledge that “the very thing that makes plastic items useful to consumers, their durability and stability, also makes them a problem in marine environments. Around 100 million tons of plastic are produced each year of which about 10 percent ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land”.

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And this has created the Trash Vortex – this gyre has also been dubbed "the Asian Trash Trail" or the "Eastern Garbage Patch". (Note: A gyre in oceanography is any large system of rotating ocean currents, particularly those involved with large wind movements). This North Pacific sub-tropical gyre covers a large area of the Pacific – the equivalent of the size of Texas – in which the water circulates clockwise in a slow spiral. Winds are light. The currents tend to force any floating material into the low energy central area of the gyre. There are few islands on which the floating material can beach. So it stays there in the gyre, in astounding quantities estimated at six kilos of plastic for every kilo of naturally occurring plankton”.

Of course, not all plastic floats. According to Greenpeace, “around 70 percent of discarded plastic sinks to the bottom. In the North Sea, Dutch scientists have counted around 110 pieces of litter for every square kilometer of the seabed, a staggering 600,000 tons in the North Sea alone. These plastics can smother the sea bottom and kill the marine life which is found there”.

The above phenomenon only applies to plastics going out to sea. I did not even talk about plastics on land – which is another issue that is as much of concern to us.

To be sure, the issue of plastic debris is one that needs to be urgently addressed. At the personal level we can all contribute by avoiding plastics in the things we buy and by disposing of our waste properly. That’s what Wong is really referring to – that it is time for Malaysians to act responsibly in order to safeguard the environment! 

You have my support, Elizabeth Wong!