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PLASTIC SOUP FOUNDATION DISAGREES WITH EUROPEAN CONSUMERS’ ASSOCIATIONS
23 January 2023
In November 2022 the Dutch Consumers’ Association Consumentenbond published the results of a report which made us raise our eyebrows. In this article the Consumentenbond concluded that a plastic shopping bag is environmentally the best option.
Until then we had always found the organization to be very critical and really appreciated working with them and sharing all our data on microplastics. But the report on shopping bags does not meet our standards, so we felt obliged to reply. Also because the plastics industry really loves it and sent out this special press release.
Enquiry learned that the article by the Consumentenbond was based on research by the organization Euroconsumers. The partners in these were four consumer’s rights organizations in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Belgium (Deco Proteste, OCU, AltroConsumo and Test-Achats).
According to this study (LCA for supermarket shopping containers in Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) the plastic LDPE bag has the smallest impact. For this the environmental impact of 96 shopping bags had been looked at “during all stages of the bag’s life cycle”.
If only it were that simple!
Anyone looking at the study in question will immediately see that not all life cycle stages have been included. The researchers have looked at 16 environmental impacts for production, distribution and end-of-life phase. What is obviously missing from this Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method is the damage plastic causes when it ends up in the environment.
Deco Proteste writes to us that Portugal, Spain, Italy and Belgium have ‘…implemented end-of-life management systems to ensure that products are recovered and recycled, and are not discarded directly to the environment…’ And therefore: ‘… the likelihood of shopping carriers being disposed by consumers directly in the environment becomes very low.’
Lots of reasons why plastic bags are not the best option
In our reply to them, we stress that this is a very Eurocentric point of view. It ignores completely the fact that the EU is the world’s largest exporter of plastic waste. In recent years, ever more plastic has been dumped under the name of ‘recycling’. In 2021 The EU exported 887,452,255 kilos of plastic waste to non-OECD countries. Officially this plastic waste is meant to ‘be recycled’, but these countries do not have the needed plastic waste management systems in place, and our European plastic trash does indeed end up in the environment in other parts of the world.
Also closed loop systems for LDPE bags are impossible and we should all know by now that recycling is simply not the answer. Please read our letter if you want to see our full list of arguments.
Hopefully this makes the Consumentenbond, Deco Proteste, OCU, AltroConsumo and Test-Achats reconsider their earlier conclusions and share our view with the European consumers.
Elles Tukker
Plastic Soup Foundation
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