Clearly, this French ban on single use plastic bags is a legitimate regulation, right?
As of 1 July this year, the distribution of “single-use plastic bags”, defined as bags thinner than 50 microns (0.05 millimetres), will be banned at shop tills. “And on 1 January 2017 the second stage of the measure will come into operation, with a ban on the use of these bags elsewhere in supermarkets, for weighing fruit and vegetables, at the cheese counter, the butcher or the fishmonger,” said Baptiste Legay, a director in the French Ministry of the Environment’s waste and circular economy department.
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Officially, the rationale behind the new rules on plastic bags is strictly ecological: to reduce the number of plastic bags that pollute the environment and end up in the oceans by making them compostable. “These new biosourced bags will be compostable at home, which will place France on the right tracks towards a circular economy: what comes from the earth returns to the earth,” said Christophe Xavier Doukhi de Boissoudy, the director-general of Novamont France, a bioproducts company.
Or is it actually a case of disguised protectionism:
But behind this drive for home composting hides another agenda: 90% of the single-use plastic bags currently distributed in France are imported from Asia.
The make-up of the bags that will be permitted, once this decree comes into force, will mean they will start to decompose at around 26°C. In other words, cargoes of biosourced plastic bags from Asia that meet the new French requirements would not arrive unscathed from a journey of several weeks in a sun-heated shipping container.
John Persenda, the owner of Sphère, the European leader in plastic films and bags, could not disguise his pleasure. “We just know our Asian competitors are going to kick up a fuss,” he said.
