Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with a statement from Symphony Environmental
Ukraine is trying to follow in Europe’s footsteps in cracking down on plastic pollution – but there is still a ways to go.
On Nov. 12, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed a bill that would ban certain types of single-use plastic bags starting in 2022 in its first reading.
A previous version of the bill was introduced in January but it stalled until the new parliament was elected in August 2019. Now this draft is among a slew of waste control bills – largely introduced by lawmakers from the Servant of the People party – that aim to establish a better system to tackle Ukraine’s growing waste problem.
The European Parliament passed a similar law in May: their version will ban single-use plastic items like plates, cutlery and straws across the EU starting in 2021. All the member states must also achieve a 90% collection rate for plastic bottles by 2029. The bottles, in turn, will have to contain at least 25% recycled content by 2030.
But the Ukrainian bill is more modest in scope. It would only ban plastic bags with a width of up to 50 micrometers, so thin that they can hardly be used more than once. So the law will force the retailers, including Ukraine’s largest supermarkets Silpo and ATB, to get rid of them.
If stores and restaurants continue to sell, offer or promote such bags, they will face fines from $7 to $14. If they are caught red handed a second time, the fines will go up to $350.
The ban, however, will not include smaller bags with a length of up to 450 millimeters, a width of up to 225 millimeters and a depth of up to 345 millimeters – these are the bags used for packaging fresh meat, fish and grains.
According to a 2018 petition by the environmental NGO ReThink, every Ukrainian uses about 500 polyethylene bags per year, and a very small percentage of them are recycled. These bags take over a century to decompose and they kill animals, birds and fish after ending up in the ground, woods, rivers and oceans, according to ecologists.
Garbage fires often plague landfills, and many people across the country burn their garbage which releases cocktails of harmful byproducts into the air, further poisoning people and the ecosystem. Incinerating plastics in a safer manner requires extremely high temperatures and specialized equipment.
Plastic bags are just one facet of the pervasive plastic pollution problem around the world and in Ukraine. The country is awash with recyclable and non-recyclable plastic due to a lack of legislation that would define responsibility for covering sorting and recycling costs. Polyethylene bottles are another big part of solid waste pollution in Ukraine, the majority of which are produced by popular soft drink companies.
The Rada ecology committee is working on a framework bill to regulate waste treatment, including collection, sorting and recycling, though the legislation has a long way to go before it is ready for a vote. Recycling is not a panacea for plastic pollution as most plastics can only be recycled a limited number of times and are stymied by low demand compared with virgin plastic. Alternative methods of utilizing plastic waste includes incinerating it for energy or chemically treating it in the presence of heat to create fuel.
Even more impactful might be avoiding the creation and use of plastic waste to begin with. ReThink co-founder Roman Puchko told the Kyiv Post that plastic garbage shoots up as quality of life improves.
“Yes, (plastic municipal pollution) is getting worse because we have markets developing and convenience stores and all kinds of goods are imported from diverse countries packed in plastic foil and plastic containers,” Puchko said.
A survey by the research center Socis found that Ukrainians are increasingly concerned about pollution in the country, with 57.7% of survey respondents saying that garbage is a top ecological problem in Ukraine.
However, people may not always be willing to be the change they want to see.
“Some people may refuse plastic bags when they are with someone else but buy them when they are alone,” Serhii Volkov, the head of environmental organization Druge Zhittya, told the Kyiv Post.
Ukraine’s new bill also proposes a ban on so-called oxo-plastics that contain the substance D2W, produced by the company Symphony Environmental. Oxo-degradable bags are marketed as biodegradable plastics, but they fall apart into microplastic particles, which are nearly impossible to gather, according. The particles easily get into the ground, air and water supply and thus into the bodies of people and animals.
Symphony Environmental said in an emailed statement that the company’s technology was invented to deal with microplastics instead of creating them and insisted that D2W makes plastic biodegradable. The company’s deputy chairman Michael Stephen wrote that banning oxo-plastics would deprive Ukraine of “the only way to deal with persistent plastic waste in the foreseeable future.”
The impact of microplastic is still poorly understood, but many ecologists have condemned it. The European Union had recommended to ban the use of plastics that contain D2W, however the European Chemicals Agency dropped its intention to restrict oxo-plastics in May “due to new legislation restricting oxo-degradable plastics,” according to ECHA’s website
Puchko said that while companies with corporate social responsibility programs promoted the use of oxo-plastics as environmentally friendly, that attitude started to change in 2019.
Opponents of an outright ban on single-use plastic bags said that instead of reducing the use of such bags, it would just drive them into the shadows and argue that many unofficial markets, including open-air bazaars, will continue to use single-use bags.
