Ms Essex attended a meeting of the British-Irish Council's Environment Sectoral Group on January 16 2003, which considered a report from officials on the plastic bag tax in Ireland. The Irish government brought in a levy of around 10p for every new plastic carrier bag in March 2002 (see letsrecycle.com story).
“The plastic bag tax in Ireland is an excellent example of an environmental tax seeking to change behaviour,” Ms Essex said. “Its success will not be measured by the revenue it raises but by the fall in the number of bags filling landfill sites or littering the streets.”
The power to impose a carrier bag tax on consumers in Wales lies in Westminster, rather than in the Welsh Assembly, however, so as Ms Essex admitted, she can only add her voice to the debate, and hope that the government listens.
“I have encouraged the UK Government to look carefully at the Irish experience with a view to introducing a parallel measure in the UK,” Ms Essex said. “Single use plastic bags are an indicator of how wasteful we are of resources. We are happy to take a bag, use it once and then throw it away. Most of the bags in household waste will end up in landfill sites where they will take hundreds of years to degrade.”
She added: “I know that many supermarkets are offering a bag for life to encourage people to reuse their bags, and I commend them for this.”
The Carrier Bag Consortium, a group of UK carrier bag suppliers campaigning against a carrier bag tax, has said that the Irish tax is having a falsely positive effect on the environment.
A spokesman for the Consortium said: “Original reports suggested that the very visible use of checkout bags has dropped by 90%, but our members, who also make bin liners and refuse sacks, report the less obvious but equally dramatic increase of up to 300% in sales of plastic bin bags as people turn to them in the absence of carriers. There is no material saving, so where is the environmental sense in all this?”
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