Huge plastic bags a worry on Prairies

If you think a plastic shopping bag is bad for the environment, consider the impact of a single-use bag that is 150 metres long and three metres in diameter.

In Saskatchewan and across the Prairies many farmers are using enormous plastic bags to store grain. The bags are cheaper and more easily moved to a farm site than conventional metal storage bins.

However, concerns have cropped up over what happens to the bags after they have been used.

"It's definitely a hot topic," Tammy Myers, co-ordinator of a southwest Saskatchewan environmental program, told CBC News Wednesday. "Your typical shopping bag is less than one mil of thickness and they're very hard to recycle."

Grain bags, Myers pointed out, are eight to ten times thicker. "They're very thick, very tough," she said.

Political leaders in rural Saskatchewan are raising concerns about the bags ending up in landfills. They are suggesting a levy or deposit system to encourage recycling.

"We'd like to see the implementation of a deposit put on these bags so it gives an incentive for whoever uses them to bring them back," Roland Levac, reeve of the rural municipality of Gravelbourg in southwest Saskatchewan, told CBC News earlier this week. "There is a need for them to be recycled."

Levac said the bags, which can hold upwards of 10,000 bushels of grain, have grown in popularity in the last few years and he expects that to continue.

"As the farms get bigger, this is ... cheap storage," Levac said.

Levac said in some cases, people are just abandoning the used bags.

"They're going to create a rat problem," he said. "We feel that unless there is a reason that you have to bring them back -- which is a deposit -- a lot of them will just be left aside somewhere."

Myers said one study found that about 15,000 grain bags are sold in Saskatchewan every year. "At 300 pounds a bag, that's a significant amount of plastic," she said.

Plan to bale and ship

Myers is working on a recycling scheme that would see the bags collected, rolled into a tight bale and shipped to a recycler in Alberta.

"What we're trying to offer is a service to people who are looking for an alternative to landfilling or burning the bags," she said.

Shipping to Alberta, she conceded, would entail more costs and generate other environmental effects including the burning of fossil fuel for the transport trucks.

"Sometimes you have to make a little bit of sacrifice environmentally with the fuel to get it there, in order to get this plastic recycled and not burned or landfilled in Saskatchewan," she said.

Myers said the recycling fee model is familiar to people and expects most farmers would accept that, but she said the fee would have to be set carefully.

She suggested a 10 to 15 per cent levy on grain bags, which translates to $70 to $100 a bag.

Myers's group, the Moose Jaw River Watershed Stewards, includes 22 rural municipalities and four communities in southwest Saskatchewan.

"We're hoping to ship about 270 to 360 tonnes of grain bags to Alberta sometime in the next 12 months," she said.

(Source: http://www.cbc.ca, March 9/11)

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