The country will not produce, sell or use plastic bags thinner than 0.025mm, China top legislative body said in a statement on the government's website.
These bags tore easily and were usually thrown away, causing pollution, the State Council added.
Supermarkets and shops, where most plastic bags were used, would not be allowed to distribute any carriers for free, it said.
Consumers were encouraged to use reusable bags and to recycle more, it added.
The environment bureau has also been tasked to increase plastic recycling efforts by setting up more collection points, the council said, adding that financial bodies have to come up with a tax system to control waste plastics pollution soon.
"Richards HR Solutions Ltd has always had a strong sense of community and corporate social responsibility. We are proud to be associated with the Million Bags for Life project and helping with production costs through advertising our business. By using this excellent bag from SkyMark it is a way in which everyone can make a small contribution to the real problem of global warming and reducing waste."
Trevor D Richards
Managing Director
Richards HR Solutions Ltd
Retail Newsagent has been informing readers for more than 100 years, since its launch in 1889. The weekly publication has a circulation of close to 14,000, directly targeting independent newsagents. And this week decided to support Million Bags 4 LIfe in the News in Breif Column.
In Store - The Magazine for retail marketing and design, supports Million bags 4 life with its coverage in the October issue.
Packaging Europe is a unique concept that offers three separate but complementary information channels to packaging professionals and users. It is a comprehensive source of NEWS, INFORMATION, INTERVIEWS,STATISTICS, COMPANY PROFILES and CONTACTS across the entire packaging industry in EASTERN, CENTRAL and WESTERN EUROPE.
And they have supported our project. link to Packaging Europe news page: http://www.packagingeurope.com/NewsDetails.aspx?nNewsID=16082
We have just achieved coverage on an environmental website called Hippy Shopper (3,521,976 unique visitors) which covers fashion, food and drink, health and beauty, energy-saving and carbon neutrality providing daily advice and product news.
Link to the website http://www.hippyshopper.com/green_news/
27 June 2007 18:41 [Source: ICIS news]
HOUSTON (ICIS news)--Questions about the performance of a degradable plastic are discouraging its acceptance among bag makers, a technical director of a bag company said on Wednesday.
Proponents of oxo-biodegradable plastic said bags made from the material could be the answer to ban bags being introduced by cities such as San Francisco, California, but such bags have their own set of issues, according to one bag company official.
The degradable plastic is made by adding inexpensive catalysts to common plastics, said Lee Doty, president of the Oxo-Biodegradable Plastics Institute, a trade group in Edmonton, Canada.
He said the material could be used to address bans on plastic bags. Such bans are becoming popular because cities are concerned about litter and limited landfill space.
However, bags made of the degradable plastic may cause more problems than they solve, said Frank Ruiz, technical director of Heritage Bag, a Texas-based company that makes compostable and traditional plastic bags.
The bags break down into fragments, which may persist in the environment, Ruiz said. Picking up tiny fragments could become a larger litter problem than the traditional bags, he said.
In addition, there are questions about the structural integrity of simulated wood and other recycled products made of the degradable plastic, Ruiz said.
Doty said a soon-to-be-published Canadian study shows that the recycled materials maintain their structural integrity. Also, the fragments continue to degrade, he said.
However, Doty and Ruiz agreed that technical criteria is preventing wider adoption of the plastic. It does not degrade quickly enough to be considered compostable by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM).
Most cities considering bag bans are using the ASTM standard for all acceptable plastic bags, not just those destined for compost heaps.
Nonetheless, Doty said cities should consider excluding degradable plastics from their bans. He said the plastic performs well in landfills, which are the destinations of most bags.
The degradable bags are also cheaper than the compostable ones, an important factor since most people throw away the bags, he said.
Given the growing interest to ban common plastics from bags and packaging, degradable plastic could be a reasonable way to address the concerns of the public, Doty said.
"What can the conventional plastics industry do to defend their products and their markets?" he said during a recent conference held in Houston, Texas.
"Conventional plastic packaging, and particularly films and plastic bags, is under siege. It is probable that the San Francisco initiative will spread elsewhere, irrespective of the fact that, in many ways, it is counterproductive," he said.
It's been the subject of many environmental debates across Europe; now the plastic carrier bag is the subject of a new joint initiative in the UK.
A number of the UK's largest retailers have signed the voluntary agreement, which comes in response to calls for action by Environment ministers in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
The joint initiative involves representatives from across the retail sector, and is backed by WRAP (the Waste & Resources Action Programme), and the British Retail Consortium.
In a statement, Defra* says the initiative aims "to reduce the overall environmental impact of carrier bags by 25% by the end of 2008."
According to Defra, retailers will reduce the environmental impact of the bags in three ways: encouraging customers to reduce the number of carrier bags used; reduce the impact of each carrier bag, by using less material or incorporating recycled content; and enabling the recycling of more carrier bags where appropriate.
The department says that further discussion is required to agree a baseline figure and appropriate unit of measurement to report annually on meeting reduction targets.
"This will need to take account of reusable bag initiatives and the use of recycled materials in preference to virgin," the statement said.
The initiative has received the backing of the UK's Packaging and Industrial Films association.
As well as the main supermarkets, the retailers who have signed up include Boots, Debenhams, Halfords, the John Lewis Partnership, Next Group, Tesco, Primark Stores, Early Learning Centre, and the Home Retail Group (Argos and Homebase).
As the Emballage packaging fair drew to a close on Friday last week, the Paris city hall issued a statement that it is launching a plan to "put an end to the distribution of plastic bags" from 2007.
The plan is intended to reduce waste, with plastic bags accounting for 8,000tpa and costing €1.6m each year.
The statement from the city hall follows a meeting held on 20 November between Lyne Cohen-Solal, responsible for commercial affairs, and Yves Contassot, responsible for environment and waste issue and says that the city of Paris recommends the prohibition of the distribution of plastic bags at retail outlets that would otherwise only come into force under national legislation as from 1 January 2010.
Under the national legislation, bags made of biodegradable plastics should still be permitted as from 2010. But a statement by the city of Paris says that it plans to obtain signatures of a Charta with trade associations aiming to eliminate disposable bags of petroleum origin in 2007.
It would appear from the city of Paris statement that only plastic bags made from renewable materials will be allowed by the Charta, namely not biodegradable bags made from petroleum-based products.
The statement concludes that disposable bags have become a symbol of waste production and their environmental impact is unacceptable
New law likely to come into force in 2010.
24 October 2006 – Italy’s new centre-left government is set to agree legislation that will make biodegradable carrier bags obligatory as of 1 January 2010. An amendment to budgetary legislation now being voted on has already been agreed by an environmental commission in the lower house of parliament, and appears set to pass a full vote.
The amendment would ban both production and use of carriers in plastics derived from petroleum. "The result will be to reduce waste dangerous to the environment, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and thus [help] meet objectives fixed under the Kyoto Protocol," said Ermete Realacci, president of the commission.
Plastics industry trade groups are questioning the cost to processors of converting to production of biopolymer film as well as the cost of the bags themselves (likely to be around twice as much as PE bags) and the suitability for purpose of such materials (although Novamont’s Mater-Bi is already used in limited quantities for carrier bags.) There is also the isssue of material availability. At present, biopolymer production capacity in Italy is only 8,000tpa, according to the Italian website Polimerica.
Italian agricultural association Coldiretti calculates that some 200,000 hectares of land would need to be given over to crops to make sufficient biopolymers for all the new bags needed.
The Italian magazine Panorama quotes environmentalist group Legambiente as putting the annual production of carrier bags in Italy at 300,000 tonnes (other sources quote a figure closer to 200,000 tonnes), involving the production of 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Some supermarkets already use biodegradable carrier bags. Coop Italia is one, although it appears likely the bags it uses, made from polyethylene compounds containing an additive promoting oxydegradation, would not be permitted under the new regime.
Italy is following in the steps of France, which several months ago voted in similar legislation to take effect in 2009.