Banning Plastic bags target not reach?‏

Research by Chris HH LIM

About 250,000 of that overall reduction might be thanks to the small NSW South Coast town of Mogo. Coles Bay in Tasmania, a small town on the whale migration route, was the first Australian town to ban plastic bags five years ago. It has used 1.75 million fewer bags since then and is the inspiration for a ban in Modbury, Devon, hailed by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
At the Kangaroo Valley general store, they pack groceries in paper bags, for which they impose no charge.
"People come in and say, 'Oh, wow, you see these in the movies,' " the shop's co-owner, Andrea Neill, says. No one is ever stroppy to be told plastic is not an option, she says.
But are paper bags any better than plastic? Much has been written about the energy and water required to make a paper bag being far greater than that for its plastic competitor. Dee argues this ignores the long-term environmental effect of plastic, its failure to break down for as long as 1000 years, and that billions of the bags are imported to Australia from China, consuming more energy.
He says it also ignores that paper is a biodegradable, renewable, recyclable resource, and it takes no account of the trouble that a single plastic bag can create when it contaminates a recycle bin. It can shut down machinery at a recycling plant and be a nightmare for sorting staff to untangle. Only about 5 per cent of Australia's plastic bags are recycled, despite recycling bins in supermarkets.
At Bangalow, in northern NSW, women have joined almost 700 morsbags groups worldwide, which work in sewing bees to make reusable shopping bags from second-hand fabrics: old sheets, curtains, whatever. They give the bags to shoppers free.
But South Australia will be the real test case. It expects its ban could result in 400 million fewer plastic bags - or 1600 tonnes of plastic - becoming litter or landfill every year.
In the land of the Tidy Town, will South Australia be crowned the Tidy State? If there is ever an Australian Beauty, might it be shot in South Australia - without a plastic bag? Or, perhaps, a biodegradable, compostable plastic bag?