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Published on February 9, 2008

The Natural Resources and Environment Ministry sounded an alarm when it said Thailand produced 14.8 million tonnes of garbage last year, or over 40,000 tonnes a day. Of this staggering amount of trash, only 3.3 million tonnes, or 22 per cent, was recycled or re-used. As part of the effort to contain the overflowing garbage problem, the ministry is working on a campaign to discourage the unnecessary use of plastic shopping bags. Topping the target list is the wasteful use of small plastic bags that the ubiquitous convenience stores hand out to their customers.

These plastic bags become garbage as soon as the goods bought from the stores, usually food and beverages, are consumed. This happens almost immediately after customers step out of the shop. For example, a customer who buys a can of soda and a hamburger is usually offered one separate bag for each item, even though they could be easily hand-carried.

In this country, the giving of plastic bags is seen as a gesture of generosity toward customers. The bags are supposed to provide additional "convenience" to the customers, who don't really need them. Such perverse logic applies not only to customers of convenience stores but also to most other businesses, as well. It is obvious that checkout-counter attendants and sales assistants have been expressly instructed by their employers to hand out bags for every purchase, no matter how small. To business owners, being stingy with plastic bags is considered an unforgivable sin. This nonsense is based on the assumption that a customer's experience is supposed to be enhanced by being given something for free.

A well-thought-out public education campaign must be devised to change this mindset among business owners as well as consumers. Shoppers at grocery stores and supermarkets should be encouraged to bring their own bags, preferably made of cloth or durable plastic, to take away their purchases. At the same time, business owners should be asked to become less generous with free plastic bags or even to charge customers who ask for extra, unnecessary bags.

Both consumers and business owners must be given clear incentives to abandon their old behaviour, which is unfriendly to the environment. People must be told that the garbage they generate requires expensive and harmful disposal either through landfills or in the incinerator. Both methods are becoming expensive because of fast-dwindling sites suitable as landfills and because of the rising price of fuels used in incinerators and the cost of maintaining them.

Many communities, particularly towns and cities, are facing the problem of how to keep their garbage under control. It used to be easy to find cheap land away from city centres to be used as dump sites. When the cheap land was exhausted, some cities used to be able to persuade - for a price - poorer communities to take their garbage. But such practices are becoming a thing of the past as communities become more aware of the downsides of taking other people's garbage, including environmental degradation and possible health hazards. No one wants a garbage dump in their backyard and it will be more difficult to convince communities to burden themselves with waste products from others. Finding suitable sites for garbage incinerators, even the most hi-tech and least polluting ones, is even more difficult, as no one wants to live anywhere near such burners.

A reduction in the unnecessary use of plastic bags is the easiest step forward and will hardly inconvenience anyone. More difficult will be the attempt to encourage manufacturers and consumers to abandon their penchant for unnecessary packaging, like super-strong plastic mouldings made from pellets that are costly to produce but that become garbage the moment the goods contained in them are removed for the first time.

Each community will eventually have to decide how best to deal with the issue of garbage disposal and what technologies are the most cost-effective and cause the least environmental impact.

Eventually it will come down to the use of pricing mechanisms. Politically unpopular measures, such as charging residents for garbage disposal based on the amount generated, must be introduced alongside the campaign to cut back on waste through recycling and re-use, reduction in unnecessary packaging materials and simply less wasteful consumption.