Don't be a cynical windbag, plastic bag drop shows it’s not hard to make small, positive changes in Singapore

NOTHING really happened, did it? When the plastic bag charge came in last July, there was some complaining, but the sky didn’t fall in. Or our rubbish chutes, which was the initial fear. A minority spoke up for fearful chute users across the island. How would a first world nation cope without free plastic bags from the supermarket?

The issue didn’t trigger a bout of existential hysteria; such outbursts are reserved for the really serious social issues, like void-deck football games. But there were concerns. Singaporeans had to care for thousands of rubbish chutes, which had to be fed free plastic bags from FairPrice, Cold Storage, Giant and other supermarket operators with an annual turnover of more than $100 million.

(I’ve always been tickled by that distinction. I understood the five-cent charge imposed upon major supermarkets from an economic standpoint, but I liked attributing it to really snobbish rubbish chutes. Only plastic bags from the $100 million club were good enough for those atas babies.)

But critics were concerned. Without those free bags, would Singaporeans be reduced to tipping away last night’s fish curry with their bare hands? Would our rubbish chutes look like that soggy scene in Carrie? Would we ever take personal responsibility for anything?

As a relevant sidenote, when I lived in the Australian suburbs, we had three coloured dustbins: red for trash, yellow for recycling and green for greenery. And when it came to refuse separation, the neighbours turned into the CIA, peering through cracks in curtains and muttering, “He’s put an unwashed soup tin in the recycling again, the Pommy bastard.”

But there was a sense of communal responsibility towards waste, recycling and doing one’s bit for the environment, before the neighbours stepped out for a coffee in a gas-guzzling utility vehicle big enough to launch a military invasion.

Most of the developed world had already done away with plastic bags

In Singapore, however, we take things a little slower. The mandatory disposable carrier bag charge was introduced last July, by which stage, most of the developed world had already moved on. China had stopped handing out free plastic bags in 2008 (and made ultra-thin plastic bags illegal.) Bangladesh had been the first country to ban thin plastic bags in 2002, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

But we got there in the end, thanks to the valiant efforts of environmental groups and dogged campaigners like Louis Ng, the MP for Nee Soon GRC. And this week, Grace Fu, the Minister for Sustainability and the Environment, shared some uplifting news. Major supermarket operators recorded a 50 to 80 per cent drop in the number of disposable bags used by consumers since the minimum five-cent charge came into play.

And we survived. The rubbish chutes didn’t become seas of curry and our heroic housing estate cleaners, frequently overlooked during these debates, didn’t need to carry out their daily tasks dressed like Jacques Cousteau.

But Singapore had to do something drastic. According to a 2018 study by the Singapore Environment Council, consumers were taking around 820 million plastic bags from supermarkets each year, with two to four bags taken per person per trip. What were we doing with all these bags? Eating them?

We know what some were doing. We’ve seen them: the plastic bag fetishists, the ones who must use different bags to separate the roll-on deodorant from the packaged broccoli to presumably reduce the risk of catching that deodorant-broccoli disease we've been reading about. Thanks to habitat destruction, viruses are jumping between the species so we might as well prepare for something leaping between supermarket products.

Minister Fu suggested it was too early to know if the plastic bag drop has had a positive impact on broader, eco-friendly practices and cynics will claim that our daily rubbish is still packaged and dumped – we’ve essentially swapped one bag for another – but let’s keep the tone upbeat. We’re still talking about the issue. And, if you got past the deodorant-broccoli reference, you’re still reading about it. Everyday tweaks keep an existential crisis part of our everyday conversation.

Behavioural nudge the only shot to finding the right way home

Minister Fu called the plastic bag decline a “behavioural nudge” and she’s right. Behavioural nudges are only breadcrumbs in a Grimm story, sure, but they’re probably our only shot at finding the right way home.

In the UK, a Guardian report last year showed that the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98 per cent since retailers began charging for them in 2015. Remarkably, the British government claimed the average person in England now only bought two single-use bags a year (I can testify to this after a recent trip to an English supermarket, where asking for a plastic bag from a cashier was like asking to sleep with her sister.)

And now, UK environmentalists are calling for behavioural nudges elsewhere, in terms of single-use plastic waste in other residential and commercial areas and Singapore’s campaigners are doing the same. The drop in supermarket plastic bags is part of a gentle, benign indoctrination process, encouraging good eco-habits, one breadcrumb at a time. As long as the debate continues, the climate crisis persists in the public consciousness.

If we focus on plastic, we can focus on its contents. Food waste makes up half of the average 1.5kg waste thrown out by each Singaporean household daily, according to Towards Zero Waste Singapore. And more than half of that household food is preservable. Rice, noodles and bread are the most commonly chucked out items, which means the energy and water that has gone into the harvesting, transporting and packaging of those items was essentially wasted, too.

If we focus on waste, we can focus on reusing. Reusing food. Reusing plastic. Reusing everything we can when we know the Semakau Landfill is likely to run out of space by 2035.

So maybe we save the cynicism and see the positives in the drop in disposable carrier bags at supermarkets. It’s a behavioural nudge in the right direction, towards a broader conversation, sustainable alternatives and, hopefully, a bit of hope. Keep talking rubbish and we might yet save the place.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 28 books.

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