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Beginning Saturday, New Zealand will become the first country to ban the thin plastic bags that supermarket customers use to collect their fruit and vegetables.
The new ban will also extend to plastic straws and silverware, as the government expands a campaign against single-use plastics it started in 2019 when it banned the thicker plastic shopping bags that customers used to carry home their grocery items. These days, most customers bring their own reusable tote bags to stores.
Officials estimate that on average, each New Zealander sends more than three-quarters of a ton of waste to landfills every year.
“New Zealand produces too much waste, too much plastic waste,” said Associate Environment Minister Rachel Brooking.
Brooking said the 2019 bag ban had already prevented more than 1 billion plastic bags from being used in New Zealand, and the new ban on thin bags would add a further reduction of 150 million bags per year.
Officials investigated concerns the latest ban wouldn't help the environment much if customers simply switched to using disposable paper bags to collect their fruit and vegetables.
“The answer was still yes, it’s still worth doing this, but we really want to reduce single-use anything packaging,” Brooking said. “So we want people to be bringing their own bags, and supermarkets are selling reusable produce bags.”
Brooking said the emphasis would be on educating people but that officials could impose penalties on businesses that chose to flaunt the rules.
The Countdown chain of supermarkets has begun selling polyester mesh bags that can be washed and reused.
Catherine Langabeer, Countdown's head of sustainability, said the mesh bags were tested to be reused up to 5,000 times each. Countdown was working hard to get customers to think of reusable fruit-and-vegetable bags as the norm, she said.
“But we know change is hard and will take them a little while,” Langabeer said. “We get some grumpy customers."
She said other customers were finding creative ways to carry home their purchases without using any plastic.
Critics have questioned the liberal government's environmental record, pointing out that the nation's overall greenhouse gas emissions have not decreased since the government symbolically declared a climate emergency in 2020.
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Small cloth mesh bags last
Small cloth mesh bags last forever and work well for containing multiple fruit and vegetable items. In many cases there is no need for a bag at all (e.g. a couple of peppers). What is needed is a public education campaign to show people how unnecessary it is to use these thin plastic bags.
We've been using our reusable
We've been using our reusable mesh bags for produce for about 5 years. They're great! They don't tear or break like those thin plastic bags sometimes do.
Agreed that cutting down more
Agreed that cutting down more trees isn't the answer.
Polyester mesh bags look like a good idea, but in practice they come in sizes that don't accommodate a number of things, under fridge-light they don't reveal the contents without opening, and in the washer/dryer, they accumulate lint that doesn't readily come away. And they do nothing to maintain moisture levels in produce. It's fine for those who can shop even multiple times a week, maybe.
Those ultra-thin plastic bags are a pain in the Royal Irish, as anaything with a sharp part (like a stem-piece) readily splits the bag.
Here, the health department got pissy about donating perfectly clean, re-usable bags as carry-out bags, and banned the practice.
I have a supply of as-yet-unreused plastic bags that will last me a lifetime. I'll just reuse the old plastics, and the waste people will have to find a way to deal with multiply reused "single use" plastics as long as I live. And that's from a person who's made efforts for decades to reduce plastic use.
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