Bin the bags? Not so fast

I really don't want you to miss our story on plastic bags. It ran in Saturday's paper and was of first rate importance.

Or at least it should be regarded as of first rate importance.

What, I fear, will actually happen is that the inconvenient truth it tells will be ignored. The anti-plastic bag campaign will power on as if the piece had never been written.

Why? Because too many people are committed already and because the bags are an easy target.

Here is the nub of our story:

The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.

Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags”.

The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the “typo” remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing “plastic bags” with “plastic debris”. But they admitted: “The actual numbers of animals killed annually by plastic bag litter is nearly impossible to determine.”

In a postscript to the correction they admitted that the original Canadian study had referred to fishing tackle, not plastic debris, as the threat to the marine environment.

Gordon Brown has signed up to a Daily Mail campaign (in an article entitled Why Sarah and I know this is right) to bin the bags and he is most unlikely to back off now.

Comments

[Dave B]

Yet another example of gov't eyes on headlines, rather than facts.

The pointless restrictions on Children's TV ads is my current favourite.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-tasteless--and-with-a-fat-chance-of-success-771726.html

[John Allen]

Aren't you chasing a straw man with the birds point here? The points made by John Lewis at the end of the article are far more illuminating. It probably is a moderate waste of time chasing plastic bags as an environmental issue, but then it's also a useful case in point about general wastefulness. I prefer to take a strong reusable bag to the supermarket, partly because it doesn't break, but also because I don't feel I'm wasting anything unnecessarily. It's not a huge deal. I wouldn't ban them - though I am relaxed that many supermarkets will charge for their use.