Even the sceptics should be able to see that a ban on plastic bags in supermarkets has been a positive move, says Euroa MP Steph Ryan.
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Victorian MPs from all sides of politics threw their support behind the Environment Protection Amendment Bill when it was debated in Parliament this week.
It will put a ban on all lightweight plastic shopping bags in Victoria.
Ms Ryan said Victoria was actually quite slow to introduce this law, after Bangladesh banned plastic bags back in 2002.
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"I still often forget when I go to the supermarket to take my recyclable bags and there were a few grumbles at the start when those major retailers decided to eliminate them, but that behaviour change has taken place over the last six months or so - I think that even sceptics of the scheme would now say that perhaps it is a good thing," she said.
"Overwhelmingly, people see the decision to ban single-use plastic bags as a fairly commonsense kind of decision.
"I think there is a real concern about passing a problem on to future generations if we do not actually act to reduce the amount of waste within the environment and that consumer-driven kind of attitude of using something once and then throwing it out."
But Ms Ryan said the government's plastic bag ban was just "a drop in the ocean", pointing out problems with the related issue of recycling since councils could no longer send their waste to be processed overseas.
"We have got councils begging for the state government to show leadership and show action in this space," she said.
"We now have a serious crisis and I do think that Victorians feel quite betrayed by what is happening in the recycling space at the moment.
"I was certainly shocked to discover that we were sending all of our recycling offshore and I think it reflects very poorly on us as a society and as a state that we would simply shift our problem off to other, in many cases poorer, countries to deal with the problems of a first-world country."