Toronto City Councillors Take Note

Tax cuts plastic bags in trees but not in dumps

Ireland's charge at the checkout has helped raise consciousness about litter, but has not reduced landfill volume
February 01, 2007
Deborah Dundas
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Visit a supermarket in the Republic of Ireland and you're in for a surprise at the checkout counter: You have to make a special request for plastic bags, and they cost the equivalent of 23 cents Canadian each.

As Toronto councillors toss around the idea of sharply reducing the number of plastic bags heading to the dump, perhaps through a bag tax, they may want to take a look at Ireland's example.

While the idea is being raised in Toronto as councillors try to find ways of achieving Mayor David Miller's target of diverting 70 per cent of the city's waste from landfill by 2010, Irish authorities simply wanted to tackle a growing problem in the countryside: litter.

The image of grocery bags caught in hedges and in fences – streamers of dirty, wind-torn plastic flapping in the wind and rain – wasn't exactly the picture of Ireland the government wanted to send out. Rolling green fields, sure. But, in the late 1990s, those fields were coming under threat from litter and, in particular, plastic grocery bags.

"They were a plague," says Tony Lowes, director of Friends of the Irish Environment.

"Plastic bags were springing up everywhere," agrees Sean Dunne from the Ministry of the Environment and Local Government. "They were sticking in trees and becoming prevalent as a persistent litterer."

Supermarkets and convenience stores were handing out 1.2 billion bags a year to an Irish population of just over 4 million people. The government decided something had to be done, and the plastic grocery bag tax was born. According to Lowes, an outright ban was considered but, he says, "the study commissioned by the minister at the time found that it wouldn't be as acceptable to the public."

In March 2002, the tax was imposed. Every retailer in the country had to collect a tax of 15 cents (23 cents Canadian) on every plastic bag, and remit it to the government.

"We did a 95-per-cent reduction in plastic bag use quite literally overnight," says Seamus Banim, communications manager from the major supermarket chain Tesco Ireland. "People bought into it."

With the tax in place, use of the plastic bags plummeted and consumers' attitudes changed. In 1999, according to a recent survey, 40 per cent of people were opposed to a tax. Now, after five years of the tax , 90 per cent believe it is a good idea.

A criticism of the tax – and one the Canadian Plastics Industry Association has pointed out as it lobbies hard against it being implemented in Ontario – is that the sale of conventional garbage bags has risen as a result.

A leading Irish retailer, Superquinn, is enthusiastic about the the bag tax, but agrees that sales of garbage "bin liners" have increased since it was introduced.

Ireland's Department of the Environment admits this is a limitation of the tax, as households that previously used plastic shopping bags to line kitchen bins switched to buying conventional garbage bags. "Whereas it has not reduced levels of plastic going to landfill ... it has had a huge impact on visible litter."

The taxpayer gets hit twice.....