EU set to approve historic deal to cut plastic bag use

A “historic” deal to cut Europe’s throwaway plastic bag culture is expected to be approved on Monday, which would cut the number of bags Europeans use each year by more than three quarters in just over a decade’s time.

After fractious negotiations that pitted the UK against most of the EU, the European commission has agreed to accept a compromise which should see the new regulation sent to MEPs on Friday for a rubber-stamping vote in Strasbourg early next week.

Under the new proposal, EU states can opt for mandatory pricing of bags by 2019, or binding targets to reduce the number of plastic bags used annually per person from 191 now to 90 by 2019 and 40 in 2025. Measures such as bag taxes could also be considered as equivalent.

“The significance of this package is enormous,” the Dutch Liberal MEP Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy told the Guardian. “It is a huge victory for not only the European environment but also globally as most of these single-use bags end up in the world’s oceans and are one of the big causes of the ‘plastic soup’ phenomenon.”

Some 4.5bn of the plastic bags used by Europeans each year end up as litter – often in landfills or waterways such as the English Channel, where studies have shown a floating debris field of up to 100 items per square km, threatening sea mammals and birds with entanglement and ingestion.

Over 100 species of sea birds are known to have ingested plastics, and according to a study published last month around 95% of fulmar, a seabird related to albatrosses, have been found to have potentially hazardous plastics in their stomachs.

By 2020, the number of plastic bags that end up as litter each year is projected to rise to 5.1bn. Campaigners say that more than one million plastic bags are used every minute around the world, each with an average working life of just 15 minutes.

“The agreement on new EU rules to reduce plastic bag use is a historic step towards tackling the pervasive problem of plastic waste and one that has strong popular support,” said Margrete Auken, the Green MEP and parliamentary rapporteur on plastic bags. “Thankfully, the commission has recognised this and decided not to obstruct the European Parliament and Council in finalising this important legislation.”

British concerns about the package were acknowledged with the replacement of a proposed ban of oxo-biodegradable plastic bags with a commission study into their environmental impacts. But the UK remains unhappy with the proposal’s legally-enforceable elements – despite having its own plans to put a 5p price on plastic bags in England next year.

UK government spokesmen said that negotiations on the package were still “live”, ahead of an EU vote to send the proposal to parliament tomorrow.

The commission reluctantly accepted the amended package, with the EC’s first vice president, Frans Timmermans, predicting a “rather complicated” implementation process at a press conference on Wednesday.

“If, down the road, there are problems at the national level, don’t come to the commission and say ‘you did a bad job by putting the proposal on the table’,” he warned. “Member states will have brought it on themselves”.

The proposal would be “good for the fight against pollution,” Timmermans said, “but we would have preferred our proposal as it gave more flexibility.”

The commission is concerned that European countries have vastly different waste and recycling rates for plastic bags, with Poles and Slovaks using on average around 466 bags a year while Danes – who are charged for their bag use – use only four.

Key figures in the new commission are thought to be sceptical of binding targets – and towards legislation targeting what the EU president Jean-Claude Juncker has termed “small things” more generally. That stance has chafed with some MEPs and EU countries, who have been involved in negotiations on plastic bags for many years.