Plastic bags are being demonised and job losses will not be far behind

And no, we’re not talking about asylum seekers.

Having dispatched smoking in pubs with the trusty mace of legislation, the Government is now turning its attention to plastic bags.

Depending on who you believe, UK retailers give away somewhere between 12 and 13bn of them every year. In February 2007, and under pressure from DEFRA, UK retailers signed up to a voluntary target of reducing “the overall environmental impact of carrier bags” by 25 per cent by the end of 2008. Scenting the tide of public opinion, in a speech to the Worldwide Fund for Nature last November, the Prime Minister went a lot further, saying he believed carrier bags could be completely eliminated.

His chancellor hasn’t been quite so ambitious but, in his Budget, he did say that if retailers’ efforts don’t deliver “sufficient progress” by the end of this year, provisions in the Climate Change bill will enable the Government to force
shops to make a charge for carrier bags in 2009.

Another bill currently before Parliament seeks to ban the giving away of any carrier bag in any London borough – except for Hounslow which, oddly enough, is home to Heathrow and five terminals of duty free shops.

This bill provides not only for the banning of free plastic carrier bags but also their paper equivalents (which, the plastics industry argues, do more environmental damage over their lifecycle than polythene bags).

Michael Grimes is a partner with law firm Eversheds, specialising in the waste industry. He explains, “The wider background to the London Councils bill is the new rules brought in a number of years ago by the EU Landfill Directive.

“The Government in England and Wales has imposed targets on councils which significantly reduce the amount of what’s called ‘biodegradable’ waste which they can put into landfills. As a result of that councils are having to
spend a lot more, because they’re facing fines of up to say £150 per tonne, if they landfill more than their allowance.

“The first thing to do is to reduce the total amount of waste which they have to deal with.”

The retail and packaging industries have come out strongly against the bill, and against any attempt to impose wider restrictions in the UK.

Peter Woodall is spokesman for the Carrier Bag Consortium, a manufacturers’ group set up by members of the Packaging and Films Association, a fairly self-explanatory plastics industry representative body.

He says that his members would be “almost certain” to seek judicial review of any legislation that might be passed. “And I think there are other issues as well that might look towards calling upon European law, for the European courts to adjudicate,” he continues.

“Issues such as the right to compete on a fair playing field – competition laws and those kind of laws. And I think it would be a long battle on that basis.”

Grimes isn’t convinced of the industry’s case. He says, “It would be difficult to envisage the basis on which they could mount a challenge because it’s similar to a speed limit or lots of other laws. The Government has a policy and enacts laws to enforce that policy.

“You’d have to argue that the Government hasn’t acted for proper purposes or has been irrational. And it’s quite hard, just as a non-technical person looking at the evidence, to see why it might be irrational to say you must charge 10p for a plastic bag in order to try to limit the use of plastic bags.”

It is clear, at any rate, that the industry is worried. When the Scottish Executive was putting together abortive plans for a 10p tax on plastic bags in 2005, estimates of job losses ranged between 700 and 1,000. A similar figure was applied to a ban proposed by the Welsh Executive last year.

Scotland and Wales between them account for just 13.3 per cent of the UK population so, assuming between them a total loss of around 1,500 jobs, a little schoolboy maths reveals a UK-wide job toll of more than 11,250 based on the common expectation of a 90 per cent drop in bag usage.

With a wholesale price of £10 per 1,000, bags given away by retailers represent a £120 million market in the UK. The vast majority of the very thin bags distributed liberally by supermarkets are manufactured in China, Thailand and Malaysia.

Heavier grade bags such as those provided by high street non-food retailers, though, are made by plastics firms throughout the land. And a substantial distribution industry exists to transport bags of all grades to retailers.

Although the job loss estimates put together by the plastics industry for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are a useful benchmark, the nature of the industry is such that the overall impact of any ban is hard to quantify – because most UK carrier bag manufacturers also make an awful lot of other things.

Our plastics industry being more diversified, Britain thankfully doesn’t have an equivalent of Suiping Huaqiang Plastic, China’s largest plastics manufacturer, which went to the wall in January – within two months of the Chinese Government imposing a ban on the ultra-thin bags that accounted for most of its £155 million revenues. It took 20,000 jobs with it.

Woodall says, “I think one has to take into account that the bag market in the UK is not just for carrier bags. There is a vast market for bags for fertilisers, for bags for peat, for compost, for bags for gravel – plastic bags of all kinds.

“The biggest European producer of polythene BPI plc, is a major manufacturer of bags and sacks for the agricultural sector and also for the clinical bag sector and it also manufactures polythene for agricultural protection – things like the mulch film that seedlings grow under when they’re put into the cold earth.”

If manufacturers can shift production, then, the net effect of a ban or widespread voluntary action by retailers might not actually be disastrous for the industry – especially if we look at Ireland’s example.

Anti-bag campaigners like to trot out the fact that the use of plastic carrier bags in the Republic of Ireland dropped by 90 per cent overnight when the country imposed its ban on giving them away in April 2002. Woodall points out, however, that in the intervening six years the republic’s overall consumption of plastic has actually increased.

In part this is down to the fact that “bags for life” are made of much thicker plastic than their disposable equivalents, but far more important was the realisation that “single use” carrier bags are – as Woodall emphasises at every opportunity – often nothing of the sort.

Instead, it turns out, most Irish consumers used them to line kitchen bins, to pick up dog mess and to dispose of nappy waste. So sales of bin liners and nappy sacks, which again tend to be considerably heavier than carrier bags, have gone through the roof.

So if everyone is going to start buying high-margin, high-quality plastic products that are more likely to be produced in the UK than ultra-thin carrier bags, shouldn’t the industry be celebrating rather than complaining?

“We might actually be better off as an industry, provided carrier bag manufacturers can switch their production,” Woodall concedes. “But that means investment, that means more commitment to different machines, bigger machines and so-on and so-forth.”

There is also the question of the higher-quality bags that tend to be produced in the UK for high-street shops, museums and galleries. It’s hard to see where a replacement for this business would come from.

Another worry for Woodall is that once the public turn against plastic bags – whether or not legislation is involved – other forms of packaging will be next.

“What’s happening is our products are being demonised,” he says. “And the next thing that will be targeted is the plastic that is actually keeping something fresh.

“Very often people say, ‘Why do we need a bit of plastic around a cucumber?’ Well, if they bother to ask they will find out, and the truth is that it extends the life of the cucumber from about three days to ten or 12 days.

How long his organisation can extend the life of the UK carrier bag industry is altogether less certain.

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