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"Rebate2Earth. With effect from 4th Feb 08, Plastic bags will cost 10 cents each! Plastic bags don't come for free! They cause pollution, death to marine animals and a strain on non-renewable resources... NUS Fights Climate Change"
So now we're phasing in a scheme where we have to pay for plastic bags used on campus.
As previously mentioned, plastic bags are not all bad, though those given out on campus are unlikely to be used to line dustbins or store food. Also, in Singapore in general, people are less likely to recycle plastic bags. But still.
In any case, linking reducing plastic bag use to all manner of evils, with varying improbabilities.
Pollution? Yes, but only if people throw them around (moral of the story: fight littering instead). Technically they are non-biodegradable, but we burn our rubbish anyway.
Death to marine animals? Only if they end up in the sea. So the solution is to clean our waterways and the sea and prevent people from throwing plastic bags into them (saying we should discourage plastic bag use to prevent marine animals' deaths is like saying banning parangs prevents people from getting chopped up by them).
The most ridiculous is linking it to climate change (even if only implicitly). As Climate Change Denial (which aims to explain why people deny its reality) points out, an average Brit's plastic bag consumption is less than 1/5000 of his climate change impact (measured by emissions).
Well, you might say - cutting emissions by <1/5000 is surely better than doing nothing at all. Yet this is not the case - encouraging people to engage in trivial measures crowds out those which are more effective. We all have limited money, time and energy, so encouraging useless measures is worse than useless - it is positively harmful; even the very rich, free and energetic have tons of other worthy causes in which their efforts would reap much greater rewards (e.g. working with amputees, supporting Taiwanese independence and prancing around in a bunny costume to promote PETA).
To wit:
"People have already acquired a severely distorted sense of priorities. 40% of people now believe that recycling domestic waste, which is a relatively small contributor to emissions, is the most important thing they can do to prevent climate change. Only 10% mention the far more important goals of reducing foreign holidays or using public transport.
This easy tips undermine the wider message on the seriousness of climate change. In its report on climate change messaging, “Warm Words”, the Institute of Public Policy Research argues that simple actions “easily lapse into ‘wallpaper’– the domestic, the routine, the boring, the too-easily understood and ignorable”. The IPPR is especially critical of headlines such as ‘20 things you can do to save the planet from destruction’ and said that putting trivial measures alongside alarmist warnings can lead people to “deflate, mock and reject” the very notion of climate change”.
And there is a greater danger that people might adopt the simple measures as a way to avoid making more challenging lifestyle changes. In regards of recycling MORI concluded that it was becoming “a ‘totem behaviour” and that “individuals use recycling as a means of discharging their responsibility to undertake wider changes in lifestyle”. In other words, people can adopt the simplest solutions as a part of a deliberate denial strategy that enables them to feel virtuous without changing their real behaviour."
The shocking but undeniable conclusion?
"Let’s be clear that voluntary action will never be enough- we will need radical political economic and social change."