It looks like Malaysians will continue using plastic bags

PETALING JAYA: Manager Lynn C. shops in bulk at hypermarkets once every two months. She uses about 10 plastic bags for the groceries and she re-uses the bags for the household rubbish.

The 10 bags are insufficient. The mother of three said she forks out another RM10 per month to buy black garbage bags. She likes packing her rubbish in plastic bags because they are clean and do not leak.

The 45-year-old career woman knows plastic bags are not exactly a friend to Mother Nature.

“What alternative is there? There are biodegradable bags or paper bags on sale, but they are very difficult to find and are not cheap,” said Lynn, a resident in Taman Gembira, Klang, for the past 17 years.

She added that saving the world was not just about stopping the use of plastic bags.

“I think to make the world greener, it has to be a concerted effort by all parties – the Government, industries and people themselves. I am sure there are other more pressing issues to address,” she said.

As for other types of plastics available in the house, such as bottles, Lynn tries to reuse them.

Lynn is one of the millions of Malaysians who reuse plastic bags from hypermarkets to pack their rubbish. At least she does not ask for extra bags from the cashiers.

There are other customers who do – for they feel that asking for an extra plastic bag would do little to to dent the hypermarkets’ profit or harm the environment.

However, in the bigger scheme of things, that “extra plastic bag or two” adds up to the use of 250 million plastic bags a year.

This figure is only the tip of the iceberg because they include only the bags dispensed by Giant, Cold Storage and Carrefour. What aboutthe other hypermarkets, retailers, markets and hawkers?

The 250 million plastic bags weigh a hefty 1,260 tonnes, equivalent to 126,000 10kg packets of rice, and most of them end up in landfills.

Selangor executive councillor in charge of environment Datuk Ch’ng Toh Eng said rubbish kept in plastic bags was common in landfills.

“In Selangor, a person throws an average of 1.5kg of rubbish daily. There are four million people here. We throw out about 6,000 tonnes of rubbish every day.

“That is a very scary figure because we do not have land to create so many landfills,” said Ch’ng.

Landfills can also cause environmental problems. Last year, leachate from the Kundang dumpsite was blamed for the smelly piped water in parts of the Klang Valley.

A similar problem at the Sungai Kembong dumpsite led to the closure of the Sungai Semenyih water treatment plant.

With scarcity of land, the controversy surrounding the construction of incinerators and the teething problems faced by the Refuse Derived Fuel “intelligent landfill” plant in Semenyih (once touted as the answer to the country’s solid waste management), recycling remains a very promising way to reduce rubbish.

“Open dumpsites can cause pollution, such as stench, leachate into rivers and open burning,” said Ch’ng.

He said the state government seriously considered banning the use of polystyrene boxes in Selangor some four years ago.

“But we could not enforce the ruling because feedback from the public was not encouraging and some polystyrene box manufacturers told us they had invested heavily to set up factories,” he said, urging the people to give recycling a shot.

“Take containers when buying take-away food and carry baskets when doing your marketing. Use biodegradable bags,” Ch’ng said.