Sometimes there are some good news: 2010 will mark the end, in Italy, for the plastic bags. The ban was introduced with the 2007 Budget law of Prodi government and it should have come into force just 5 days
ago. A legislative decree last July, however, has moved the deadline at the end of next year. So we still have 360 days to give up plastic bags.
Since January 2011 it will be banned production and marketing of non-biodegradable shopping bags because they are too polluting and dangerous to the environment.
In a year five hundred billion of plastic bags are produces in the world and they are used for less than half an hour. Then, once they are trashed they take between 10 to 20 years (the environmentalists say) to be disposed in our ecosystem. In
Italy are produced each year three hundred thousand tons, the
equivalent of about two hundred thousand tons of CO2 released into the
atmosphere. We use four billion each year and in our landfills end up almost two million tons of plastic.
Italy had to eliminate plastic bags at the beginning of this year, compared not only the paragraph 1130 of the 2007 Budget but also the deadline suggested by the EU directive EN 13432. The extension, however, has allowed our country to take a few more months to batten down the hatches. We're not the only ones in this delay becuse only France and Britain have announced (but not yet implemented) a halt to the plastic bag.
Give up this object will be very difficult for our habits, because, only in Italy, we use 400 bags per person per year, a quarter of those produced in Europe. Remove them from the shops, then, does not mean we've
found how to reuse those still in circulation, which somehow must be
disposed of and for which they are studying methods of recycling and
effective conversion. The supermarket chains have, however, decided to help their customers in this historical transition. Some supermarkets, for example, have introduced a choice between plastic or paper bag while others (like the French chain Auchan or Decathlon stores) use envelopes made of Mater-Bi, a type of bioplastic created starting
from corn starch, wheat and potato, completely biodegradable and
mainly used for the separate collection of organic waste (which will
then be used as compost and fertilizer).
There are also
cities that have decided not to wait for the Government but to involve
their citizens to ban plastic bags. The city of Turin, in full independence, signed with the trade associations a Memorandum of Understanding to eliminate by next April the non-biodegradable bags. From April 2nd, 2010, the
city will forbid all the shops from using plastic bags and then give three
months to the consumer to get used to the change.
From
next year, unless a further extension, the rest of Italy will use other
types of bags for their purchases (perhaps going back to cloth bags),
and after a while it will be so easy to do it. The planet will begin to gain something if it won't be flooded by the 16 million tons of plastic packaging that we bring home every time we go shopping.
Marianna Lepore
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