A local initiative in Poland takes retailers to task for giving out plastic bags free of charge
By Wojciech Kosc
"Would you like a plastic bag?"
This is a question being asked in shops, groceries and hypermarkets across Poland that customers aren't used to hearing. In fact, until recently, cashiers across the country have automatically placed purchased merchandise in plastic bags, even if it's just a single apple, even if the customer doesn't particularly want a bag.
Here, there & everywhere
This automatic giving of plastic bags to shoppers means that a great many of these bags quickly find their way onto Poland's streets, into and underneath trees and bushes, hanging from telephone wires, or just blowing around in the wind. But not all the blame for this unsightly waste should be levelled at customers, who, to be fair, aren't likely to turn down something given away for free, no matter how ephemeral its usefulness. On the other hand, those most critical of the indiscriminate handing out of plastic bags are unlikely to rally too many shoppers to their cause, which is why it has taken a legal effort and major media campaign to try and phase out the millions plastic bags resulting from the millions of shopping transactions that take place in Poland each day.
According to Krzystof Piatkowski, a Lodz city councillor from Poland's Law and Justice Party, and the individual who initiated the anti-bag campaign, some 600,000 bags are given out to Lodz shoppers each day. The figure for Warsaw is 1.8 million bags, while the nationwide total is 18 million.
"Most of [these bags] aren't recovered and recycled, and they simply end up in waste landfills," says Piatkowski.
At one hypermarket in Warsaw, according to data from Warsaw City Hall's environment department, some 500,000 disposable plastic bags are given away to customers each month. This same hypermarket also sells reusable bags, and sells about 9,000 in a typical month.
Apart from the fact that most of the disposable bags become waste almost immediately, there are other downsides as well, according to critics. Plastic bags decompose very slowly — for as long as 400 years — which means, even if there are no immediate toxic by-products of degradation, they become an accumulating mass of litter that blights the landscape, and sometimes clog water drains. The key polluting factor, says Piatkowski, is that the production of plastic bags involves burning fossil fuels, the use of which is almost universally blamed for causing or accelerating global warming.
