Regulations on the sale of plastic bags have had a negligible effect on recycling and the use of bags, with sales almost at levels they were before government introduced the regulations in 2003.
In a new paper published by the CSIR, environmental economics researcher Anton Nahman compares the relative success of recycling plastic bags, plastic bottles, cans and glass. Whereas recycling initiatives for cans, glass and plastic bottles have led to large increases in the rate of recycling, recycling rates for plastic bags remain close to zero.
This is despite producers having to pay a levy of 4c/bag to national treasury to fund the operations of a joint public-private recycling venture, Buyisa-e-bag. The levy is passed on to consumers through the cost of plastic bags.
With more than 3 trillion bags now being sold each year, large amounts of money have been collected through the levy. But the levy appears not to have found its way out of the national coffers and into plastic bag recycling.
Nahman says this is partly because of the limited number of end-uses for recycled plastic bags. But it is also because of the way funding for Buyisa-e-bag is allocated. First, the company must apply to the department of environmental affairs for funds, which in turn are requested from treasury. But business plans from Buyisa appear not to have justified the full allocation.
As a result, the buy-back centres that the company planned to establish have not been set up and a viable plastic bag recycling initiative has not been established. Consumers wishing to recycle their bags have nowhere to take them.
The declining price of plastic bags has also had the effect of undermining initial progress in reducing bag consumption. When the plastic bag regulations (which stipulated that bags must be a certain thickness and could no longer be given away free) were first introduced, the price of a bag was set at 46c. Sales fell to 10% of their previous levels. Since then the price has been reduced twice and is now less than half of what it was, at 21c.
According to Nahman, recent data (obtained from an article published in the SA Journal of Economics on "the economics of the plastic bag legislation in SA", shows that levels of plastic bag usage are close to what they were before government's intervention.
In comparison, the recycling of other packaging materials has been very successful. Collect-a-can, which collects cans and recovers high-grade steel by extracting the tin content, has achieved a 68% recycling rate for cans. Glass recycling levels also increased from 20% to 26% after the industry launched voluntary recovery programmes, and plastic bottle recovery from 2% to 17%.
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