{"id":899,"date":"2011-07-22T12:38:39","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T02:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/?p=899"},"modified":"2017-11-05T08:03:45","modified_gmt":"2017-11-05T08:03:45","slug":"banning-plastic-bags-in-canberra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/countries\/australasia\/australia\/899","title":{"rendered":"Banning Plastic Bags in Canberra"},"content":{"rendered":"

A ban on plastic shopping bags<\/a> is being phased in from this month in the ACT. My first thoughts on hearing the news was of a similar ban in Bhutan<\/a> when I was there in 2005. They’d previously tried in 1999 and have apparently tried again<\/a> in 2007.<\/p>\n

The ban had failed in Bhutan because, like the Kalahari Bushmen<\/a> and the coke bottle, Bhutanese poeple had discovered the many uses for plastic bags and weren’t keen to give it up. Our landlord’s mother even used to come into our kitchen to take the bags we’d collected. Shopkeepers felt the pressure from their customers and the police eventually gave up trying to enforce the ban.<\/p>\n

South Australia has had more success<\/a>. A study<\/a> by the University of South Australia shows that only 1% of consumers are still using store-provided bags, though it doesn’t say how they get them. Could this mean that Australian culture is more environmentally concious? Or is there another reason?<\/p>\n

That would be ironic considering our antipathy towards the carbon tax, but it’s probably too early to tell. It’s only been a couple of years in South Australia and I don’t understand the nature of a ban that still allows for even a few people to use the bags. Nor can I find any research that considers the options for other uses of bags. I rarely take ‘single-use’ bags myself, but always use them to wrap my non-recyclable rubbish. Apparently there are biodegradeable bags<\/a> to do the same thing. I wonder whether those will be available as shopping bags for the times that I don’t have other bags with me. Either way, I hope that the ACT is successful in their ban and that it continues on to the rest of the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A ban on plastic shopping bags is being phased in from this month in the ACT. My first thoughts on hearing the news was of a similar ban in Bhutan when I was there in 2005. They’d previously tried in 1999 and have apparently tried again in 2007. The ban had failed in Bhutan because,… Continue reading Banning Plastic Bags in Canberra<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1729,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions\/1729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}