Tuesday November 17, 2009
Kudos to Carrefour
MALAYSIAN Nature Society (MNS) Selangor welcomes Carrefour’s decision to implement a “no plastic bag” policy in three of its outlets in Malaysia.
This is a meaningful first step that a supermarket chain can take in helping to alleviate one of the many serious environmental problems we face.
An enormous number of plastic bags are “checked out” at the cashier from supermarkets every day, and beyond that from retail outlets in general, only to end up in landfills or incinerators or worse – in our waterways, seas and oceans. Each year, 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide – more than one million plastic bags a minute.
An individual may use as many as 100 plastic bags a month. Only a minuscule percentage of plastic bags are recycled because it generally costs more to recycle than to produce a new one.
Besides adding bulk to the landfills, plastic bags – including the biodegradable ones – take a long time to degrade. Even when they do, they can result in toxins that may find their way into the food chain.
There are already tens of thousands of plastic litter items in every square mile of ocean. As a result, millions of marine animals and birds die each year from choking or clogging of their intestines caused by plastic pollution.
When plastic bags are incinerated, highly toxic gases like dioxins can be produced. This is apart from the fact that about one million barrels of oil are required to produce the eight billion plastic bags that may be used in Malaysia each year.
MNS, therefore, applauds the leadership that Carrefour is demonstrating in seeking to address a very serious problem. We look forward to seeing this practice extended to every Carrefour outlet and other supermarket chains.
The Government also has a leading role to play. Governments in our part of the world that have taken steps to actively discourage the use of plastic bags include those of Singapore, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Australia.
Equally, we would also like to urge consumers to use reusable bags or reuse plastic bags as many times as possible.
MNS would also like to see the reduction and eventual halt of the sale of water in disposable plastic bottles.
These bottles, normally made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), take between 400 and 1,000 years to degrade and every tonne of PET manufactured produces about three tonnes of CO2, a greenhouse gas. These bottles would be unnecessary if we just carried reusable bottles that we filled with drinking water.
We may consider following the example of the Australian town of Bundanoon which in July 2009 banned bottled water and replaced it with reusable bottles that can be filled from fountains inside the town’s shops or at water stations in the streets.
GARY PHONG,
Selangor Branch Chairman,
Malaysian Nature Society.
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