14 DAY TRIAL // This November 4, the European Union announced plans to compel Member States to improve on their ecological footprint by limiting their use of plastic bags.
Thus, a new proposal rolled out by the European Commission urges that EU Member States curb the use of the lightweight plastic carrier bags either by introducing various charges or by establishing national reduction targets.
As detailed in the proposal, plastic bags have grown surprisingly popular due to the fact that they are low-weight and resistant to degradation.
The problem is that, more often than not, they are only used once – especially if they are thin ones – and then disposed of. The result is that they accumulate in the environment, and threaten the wellbeing of natural ecosystems, especially marine ones.
The European Commission has not banned the use of plastic bags in the EU, nor seems to have any intention to do so in the immediate future.
However, it did stress that Member States are more than welcome to try to tackle this environmental concern by outlawing the use of plastic bags under certain circumstances.
“We're taking action to solve a very serious and highly visible environmental problem,” Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik commented on the importance of this project.
“Every year, more than 8 billion plastic bags end up as litter in Europe, causing enormous environmental damage,” the Commissioner went on to say.
Some EU Member States such as Denmark and Finland have already taken steps towards limiting the number of plastic bags used by their citizens throughout the course of an entire year.
The European Commission is confident that, should such measures be implemented on a much wider scale, the EU's annual use of lightweight plastic carrier bags could drop by as much as 80%.
As Janez Potočnik put it, “Some Member States have already achieved great results in terms of reducing their use of plastic bags. If others followed suit we could reduce today's overall consumption in the European Union by as much as 80%.”
Countries such as Poland, Portugal and Slovakia, where the reported annual use per capita of lightweight plastic carrier bags is one of 466, are the Member States that should focus the most on sorting out this issue.