Plastic bags must go!

In Lagos they call it “nylon;” in Abuja “rubber.” Nigerian English is something else! How plastics are related to rubber, only in Nigeria, beats the imagination. It won’t be worth a Nobel Prize in chemistry to establish, but the important concern is the parasitic presence of plastic bags in the country.

These containers made from polyethylene are everywhere - in homes, gutters, rivers and lagoons, and of course at the shops and markets.

Nigerians just can’t get out of the way of plastic bags, and somehow, it’s hard to imagine life without them. Factories around the world churn out a whopping 4 to 5 trillion plastic bags annually!

At any shop or open market, in rural or urban areas, groceries, even palm oil, and other consumer items are simply packaged in plastic bags of different sizes and handed over to the customer - free of charge! And why?

The great appeal of plastics is their low production costs, as compared with other materials. And here’s more - the cost of plastic is related to the cost of petroleum from which it is manufactured. Therefore, bags made of plastic unfortunately cost next to nothing in oil-rich Nigeria.

Compared with paper bags, producing plastic ones involves less energy and water, and generates less air pollution and solid waste. Sounds positive!

But many of these plastic bags never make it to landfills; instead, they go airborne after they are discarded - moving with the wind and getting caught in fences, tree branches, ending up as roadside litter, clogging gutters, sewers and waterways.

If they make it to landfills, lumps of plastic bags can become “mummified” and persist for decades, even if they are supposed to be biodegradable.

In 2002 the South African government required manufacturers to make plastic bags more durable and more expensive to discourage their disposal.

This prompted a 90 per cent reduction in use. Supermarkets around the world, minus Nigeria of course, are voluntarily encouraging shoppers to forgo plastic bags - or bring their own bags - by offering in some cases a small per-bag refund, or charging extra for supply of the shop’s plastic bags.

Drop the plastics

So what about recycling? All recycling techniques consume energy for transportation, sorting and processing. Certainly plastic bags can be melted and re-used, but the purity of the material is reduced with each reuse cycle.

Simply, a lot of material is lost in a process which is economically unprofitable. In any case, no law in Nigeria requires factories producing plastics to install recycling plants.

The most commonly used methods of waste disposal in Nigeria - pyrolysis, or decomposition caused by heat, and direct incineration - are often environmentally damaging and unsustainable. Any way to reduce the volume of plastic bags being disposed of must be beneficial.

The maximum environmental benefit can only be gained by waste minimisation - by using less plastic bags!

It’s not Ghana that must go, but the plastic shopping bag!