Pulling the Plastic Bags Over Our Eyes

Let me be perfectly clear about this: diverting as many plastic bags as possible from our landfills is the right thing to do for the planet.

And as you certainly know by now, Atlantic Superstore grocery stores (owned by Loblaw Companies Ltd. of Ontario) have recently begun charging customers 5 cents (plus tax) for every plastic shopping bag they take from the store. The charge is part of a corporate initiative on the part of Loblaw to supposedly divert 1 billion shopping bags from landfills by the end of 2009.

But while I agree with the “stated” goal, I’m skeptical of the essential premise that shoppers taking home fewer plastic grocery bags will equal fewer plastic bags in the landfills. And I’m even more skeptical that charging for grocery bags has anything to do with environmental protection, given that the company has conveniently eliminated an operating cost and simultaneously created a brand-new income source in one fell swoop.

A Loblaw press release says that “partial proceeds” from the charge on plastic bags will go to conservation organization WWF-Canada. It goes on to say, “The remainder of the proceeds from the charge on plastic bags will be used to cover the cost of the Loblaw plastic shopping bag reduction program and invested back in the business in price and customer service.”

That glaring insult aside, the initiative appears to assume that because a grocery bag goes out the door of a retailer, it necessarily ends up in one of our landfills because customers are simply throwing them in the garbage. Plastic grocery bags are recyclable, aren’t they? I asked Inge van den Berg, VP of Public Affairs and Investor Relations for the Loblaw Company about this assumption. “There are unfortunately many that end up in landfills, with people not having the opportunity to recycle them. Therefore it is the goal to reduce the amount of plastic bags within circulation,” she told me, repeatedly. But does she have any figures which suggest what proportion of bags end up in landfills, or why? “I don't have any of that research handy,” she said.

So I called Jim Bauld, Manager of Solid Waste Resources for HRM and asked him what proportion of grocery bags is ending up in the landfill. “It's really tough to determine,” he admitted. “I know that annually through our curbside recycling program, newspapers, magazines, telephone books, and envelopes can all go in any plastic grocery bag, and we recycle about 400 tonnes a year of plastic bags through that program.” Bauld explained that all other plastic bags should be put into one bag, which should be tied and placed in your blue bag. Loose bags can gum up the sorting machinery, and dirty bags can’t be recovered.

So the big question in my mind is, “Why are plastic grocery bags ending up in landfills at all?” Since the Loblaw Company is unable to explain this, my theory is that a large proportion are simply bags that have been used for kitchen garbage – in which case they’ll only be replaced by other plastic bags manufactured specifically for garbage – with a potentially larger environmental impact.

I would suggest that the best way to keep plastic bags stay out of the landfills is to ensure that they get recycled, and I would also suggest that if the Loblaw company truly cared about the environment, they would have put more effort into communicating that fact to their customers in the first place. We may end up with fewer grocery bags with one of their logos on it in the landfill, but I doubt we’ll end up with fewer plastic bags overall.