Victoria’s plastic bag ban: a good start, but we can do more

The Victorian government has a new proposal to ban plastic bags. What is it missing?
suvajit/pixabay, CC BY

Trevor Thornton, Deakin University

The Victorian government is proposing to ban single-use lightweight plastic shopping bags.

First of all, for plastic bag devotees, don’t panic – there are alternatives such as paper, cloth and a range of other reusable bags (you can even use the cardboard cartons from the shop). For those who have been advocating for a ban, don’t relax – there is still more to be done.

While the details of the plan are still being discussed, it is good to see that the government has committed to consultation with businesses and the community. We can be assured that the government will not swap one issue for another – such as reducing the amount of plastic bags used for waste, only to increase the use of bin liners. We need to ensure that the alternatives proposed actually reduce environmental impact.

In fact, this is prime time for the government to take a step further. We can do much more than ban single-use plastic bags. We should expand the ban to cover more categories of plastic and actively move to manage waste and reduce plastic pollution.

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Read more: Getting rid of plastic bags: a windfall for supermarkets but it won’t do much for the environment

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Should the ban proceed, it will have one significant outcome. The three most common contaminants of the household recycling bin (representing 10-15% of the recycling stream, according to my own audits of kerbside recycling bins) will be banned:

• plastic bags with recyclables
• plastic bags with general waste
• empty plastic bags.

But simply looking at the perceived issues associated with plastic bag disposal is not enough. We must also understand why people actually use plastic bags. What are their shopping habits? When do they shop? Have we considered tourists who buy groceries?

Plastics ban is not enough

Instead of just banning bags, we need to look at the issue of plastic in its broadest sense. On a recent trip to the supermarket, I estimated that almost 40% of the vegetables are wrapped in plastic packaging. Even if you wanted an alternative, sometimes there isn’t one. The packaging comes with the produce.

Excessive plastic packaging around groceries. Is it necessary?
Anna Gregory/flickr, CC BY

The Victorian government has claimed that it would be impractical to ban the packaging of fruit and vegetables. But why is it acceptable to focus only on the plastic in bags and not in other vessels? Packaging is another source of excess plastic that consumes resources and contributes significantly to landfill waste. Given that many foods (such as strawberries or tomatoes) are pre-packaged, shoppers will often buy more than they need and end up wasting food.

We have the perfect opportunity to address two significant issues at the same time. The question is: will we?

The Victoria government has acknowledged that thicker, more durable plastic bags have a greater environmental impact. Yet according to the proposed policy, the banning of these bags may be optional. This is why any consultation process must encompass all types of plastic.

Is all this plastic really necessary?
Anna Gregroy/flickr, CC BY

We have the opportunity to get it right and lead the way, and it is important that all views are heard. If you would like to have your say, the Victorian government has a survey where comments can be provided.

What we can learn from other programs

When looking at programs that successfully changed our behaviour, such as “slip slop slap”, using seatbelts and reducing the road toll, promoting HIV awareness, and even litter prevention, we can identify several features that seem to be crucial to their success. They are:

• the program advised us exactly what to do and why
• there were multiple different advertisements – but each focused on the same issue
• different demographics were targeted, but with the same focus
• the advertisements were provided in multiple formats at many locations.

It will be important that any action undertaken includes an education program. It should inform consumers why this ban is happening and advise them what actions they can take.

Other policies that we can undertake include container deposit legislation. My audits of SA’s landfill rates, compared with those of other states without container deposit schemes, shows that these schemes significantly reduce the disposal of plastic waste to landfill.

These changes should be incorporated into the proposed ban of the plastic bags. We must learn from past policies to ensure we make a smooth transition away from disposable plastics. The government should be aware of the different shopping habits of our society to find a cost-effective yet sustainable solution to plastic packaging.

There are a lot of changes that we can make. It is not just limited to banning single-use plastic bags. We need to consider the bigger picture of plastic packaging so we can truly put a dent in retail waste.

Trevor Thornton, Lecturer, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Nothing but truthiness: Adani and Co’s post-truth push for the Carmichael mine

Benedetta Brevini, University of Sydney and Terry Woronov, University of Sydney

This article is part of an ongoing series from the Post-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney. The series examines today’s post-truth problem in public discourse: the thriving economy of lies, bullshit and propaganda that threatens rational discourse and policy.

The project brings together scholars of media and communications, government and international relations, physics, philosophy, linguistics and medicine, and is affiliated with the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC), the Sydney Environment Instituteand the Sydney Democracy Network.

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“Post-truth”, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, was the Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 Word of the Year, selected as a hallmark of the times in the US and UK. (Macquarie Dictionary chose “fake news” as its 2016 Word of the Year.)

Yet post-truth politics and “truthiness”, a term Stephen Colbert coined in 2005, are not solely British and American phenomena. “Truthiness” is rampant in Australia too. The debate about the proposed Adani Carmichael mine in central Queensland shows how truthiness has become part of Australian political discourse.

How can a coal mine be subject to a regime of “truthiness”? A decision to build a greenfield megamine would appear to come down to the facts, with the known harms weighed against the potential benefits. Yet we can identify three distinct traits in official discourses around the Adani mine that show truthiness at work.

Appeal to emotion and ‘gut feelings’

First, “truthiness” replaces a reliance on facts with appeals to emotion and a logic of “gut feelings”.

One of the champions of this form of logic is Tony Abbott. As prime minister, he faced criticism from environmentalists after opening a coal mine and declaring:

Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world.

Earlier in 2014, he had said that “it is our destiny in this country to bring affordable energy to the world”.

In addition to the feel-good narrative of coal as national saviour, politicians have argued that Australia’s coal will help the world solve environmental problems, rather than making them worse.

An excellent example of this reasoning comes again from the former prime minister on his visit to India in September 2014. There, echoing the Adani chief executive, Abbott argued that the Carmichael mine could improve Indian living standards and cut carbon emissions by providing “clean coal”.

Using this same emotional logic, the government later told parliament that opening the southern hemisphere’s largest coalmine would actually cut carbon pollution.

Create doubt about facts – or make them up

A second component of “truthiness” is the practice of deliberately presenting empirical facts as debatable, uncertain or political – or simply lying. The best examples of lying are the claims of the mine’s benefits to Queensland and Australia.

Most common are references to the number of jobs the Carmichael mine will provide to the Queensland economy, where the employment situation is portrayed as desperate.

For instance, Queensland federal MP Michelle Landry claimed:

The Adani Carmichael coalmine offers up to 10,000 new jobs, mainly in Queensland; A$20 billion of investment in Australia; and power, to build the living standards of 100 million people in India.

In fact, Jerome Fahrer, who prepared an economic assessment of the Carmichael mine for Adani, admitted in court that it will create an average of 1,464 direct and indirect jobs over the life of the project. Yet virtually every mine supporter has since 2014 repeated an incorrect figure of 10,000 new jobs. They include the prime minister, the attorney-general and federal and state Liberal and National Party MPs.

Another prominent tactic used to cast unwanted facts as debatable or doubtful is to generate oxymorons that promote contradictory messages.

Mining corporations in Australia – and globally – use the term “sustainable mining” to describe projects that provide jobs. Politicians have adopted this; Anthony Lynham, Queensland’s minister for natural resources and mines, declared:

This government strongly supports the sustainable development of the Galilee Basin for the jobs and economic development that it will provide for regional Queensland.

Perhaps the most pernicious oxymoron used by mine supporters is “clean coal”. To counter the claim that Galilee Basin coal is “clean”, The Australia Institute cites estimates by Adani and India’s Ministry of Coal that it “is only 10% above the average quality of domestic Indian thermal coal in terms of energy content”. This is because “the ash content of Carmichael coal is estimated to be 26% – more than double the average of 12% for Australian thermal coal”.

The institute also notes that transporting the coal inevitably creates extra pollution.

Smear without evidence

Third, to construct truthiness, statements that are not scientific, logical or fact-based have proliferated in the political debate about the Adani mine. Politicians have constantly reframed the term “activist” to connote an enemy of both the mine and the national interest. MPs have called members of green groups economic saboteurs, “vigilantes”, “terrorists” and “extremists”.

This narrative casts environmentalists not only as economic enemies of Australia, but opposition to the mine as a form of terrorism. In parliament, Queensland LNP MP George Christensen described legal action to stop the mine as “an act of ecoterrorism”. He continued:

Their lies, misinformation, slander and the frivolous legal action attacking a company for the sake of furthering an ideological cause can only be described as terrorism if you look at the criminal code.

The accusations of “eco-terrorism” and “sabotage” had no foundation in fact whatsoever. These claims were not linked to actual illegal activities by environmental groups opposed to the mine.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk summarised perhaps the most pernicious claim by mine proponents when she told parliament:

Queensland taxpayers will not be funding any infrastructure for this project. Stringent conditions will be enforced to safeguard landholders’ and traditional owners’ interests.

To keep Queensland taxpayers from funding the mine’s infrastructure, the burden will fall instead on Australian taxpayers via the Commonwealth government’s proposed $1 billion loan from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to Adani. This will fund rail lines from the mine to the coast.

Nor have the rights of the traditional owners of the mine site been respected or upheld. The state and federal governments and courts have denied all legal challenges from the Aboriginal people most affected by it.

The primary purpose of dissecting the arguments in favour of the Carmichael mine is to demonstrate the complexity of “truthiness” regimes. None of these discursive forms – gut feelings, spin and the politicisation of unwanted facts, or even outright lies – are enough on their own. Rather, these strategies overlap, intersect and reinforce each other.

The effect is to create an overarching “truthiness” regime that presents new megamines as desirable, inevitable and essential to maintain Australia’s national destiny. In response, a more complex and multi-pronged approach will be needed to convince the voting public that coal mining is not good for Australia, its economy, or the globe.

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You can read other articles in the series here.

Benedetta Brevini, Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of Sydney and Terry Woronov, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Sydney

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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