Pollution is terrible. Everywhere. Everyone knows this. And while it's certainly true that most of the world is struggling to get a handle on the issue, it's fair to say that the situation is disproportionately bad in Southeast Asia.
Our part of the world is the worst contributor to the plastic waste which is clogging up the world's oceans. More than half of the plastic waste produced globally comes from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and, yes, Thailand. This has done enormous damage to the marine environment and its ecosystems, as many recent well-documented deaths of large sea animals will attest. It was high time we did something about it.
Currently, as everyone will be well aware, there is a high-profile campaign throughout the kingdom banning single-use plastic bags in order to mitigate the problem of plastic waste. Coming into effect on Jan 1, it's actually the continuation of a campaign by local government and retailers to bring Thailand closer to a complete ban by 2021. So far, 75 major retailers across the country have stopped giving out single-use plastic bags, across 25,000 shops. These include 7-Eleven, Tops and others.
Obviously this is a good move, a step in the right direction to transform plastic-addicted Thailand into a plastic-bag-free country and help preserve the natural beauty of the land and waters that we all so dearly love. But Thailand being Thailand, within a few days, the issue had descended into farce.
While, to be fair, many have fully embraced the campaign, it turns out that not all are happy about the plastic bag ban. There's a big fuss all over social media and comments sections, with people complaining about the changes. "Very inconvenient" they say. The cloth bags are "useless for liquids and microwaved food", apparently. Some have even filed complaints to the consumer protection board over the ban. Their gripe? That retailers are taking advantage of customers by making them pay for (cheap, reusable) cloth bags.
Not to be outdone by this embarrassing lack of perspective, Thai authorities decided to come up with a doozy of their own: censor images of plastic bags on TV!
Seriously!?
The idea came from the Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment who signed a memorandum of cooperation with Channel 8 (more stations are set to sign up in the future) to stop showing single-use plastics on television. That in itself doesn't sound too bad, but for the fact that existing images of plastic bags will be blurred out on screen, as they do (completely ineffectually) with cigarettes and alcohol.
While I totally agree with the campaign to reduce the use of plastic bags, the idea of censoring plastic bags on TV is just absurd. It is unlikely to have any effect on reducing the use of plastics, and it just shows up the governments' knee-jerk reactionary approach to so many issues: rather than discuss the issue and try to educate people, just censor it. Then the problem will just go away. This is unproductive campaigning.
Meanwhile, there is another, more worrying issue to contend with. It turns out that cloth bags may not be the environmental solution they're being made out to be.
According to a report by Denmark's Minister for the Environment and Food, a single cotton-made bag may need to be reused as many as 20,000 times in order for its overall environmental impact to be lower than that of one plastic bag. Undoubtedly, when considering the environmental damage done after use, plastic bags are far worse. But the carbon footprint resulting from the production of cloth bags can be dangerously high.
Reducing our reliance on plastics remains a noble pursuit, but clearly there is no quick fix. We need to be doing all we can. Whatever kind of shopping bags we are using, we should try to reuse them as often as possible, and rely on as few as possible.
The plastic bag campaign is only a small fraction of what is required. Fighting our plastic problem isn't going to be easy. Corporations must be made to drastically reduce the amount of plastic they produce. Everyone must be brought on board with the separation of waste, through which plastic can systematically be recycled, a far more sustainable solution.
As we can see, despite how evident the seriousness of the problem is, many remain resistant to change. We'll have to see how the current campaign pans out. Hopefully, the ban proves to be a step towards a future where Thailand is a responsible user of plastics. But that eventuality still looks some way distant.
Tatat Bunnag is a feature writer for the Life section of the Bangkok Post.