February 27, 2018

Our Seas Our Future welcomes wide support for plastic bag ban.

OSOF welcomes the call by Greenpeace and the Jane Goodall Institute New Zealand, urging a regulatory ban of single-use plastic bags. OSOF joins a list of organisations and councils as a co-signatory on a letter presented to Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage at Parliament today, along with a petition signed by more than 65,000 Kiwis.

“The current campaign adds to a national and global movement that is gathering momentum to reduce the harm that single-use plastics have on the environment. This campaign also adds to a foundation of work that OSOF carried out in 2015 when a petition to phase out single-use bags was signed by more than 16,000 people and presented to Parliament.” says Noel Jhinku, OSOF Trustee.

“We’re happy to see momentum continue to build from our previous petition and engagement with Government in 2015, and we hope that the gravitas brought by high profile New Zealanders to this campaign will further highlight the issue among the public and the need for change.”

New Zealanders use over 1 billion single-use plastic bags per year and this call to ban single-use plastic bags will hopefully see fewer bags ending up in our rubbish tips and reduce the number of plastic bags that enter our oceans, which harm marine animals. A decision to ban plastic bags will be crucial for the conservation, protection and benefit of our coastal and marine environments.

OSOF will be supportive of other movements to ban or phase-out single-use plastics from the waste stream.

References:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14340
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1860/20171000
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/aquaculture/94814758/plastic-being-regularly-ingested-by-fish-consumed-in-new-zealand
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-10813-0
http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/national/govt-split-on-plastic-bag-ban/
https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/51DBSCH_SCR69828_1/d33c4ee9ef6b5595ac16eb941f8404ed15bc48af

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