WELLINGTON: Plastic soy sauce bottles shaped like fish are tiny, cute and beloved by many sushi eaters. But in the state of South Australia, the decorative containers swam into a growing net of outlawed plastics.
Officials enacted an unusually specific ban on the fish-shaped bottles beginning Monday (Sep 1), saying they were worse for the environment than other condiment containers.
The state of 1.9 million was the first in Australia to institute the prohibition in an initiative to curb plastic waste. South Australia’s government has annually added new items to its list of banned plastics, making the measures the country’s most comprehensive.
FISH-SHAPED BOTTLES WERE SINGLED OUT
Singling out the fishy containers might seem unusually specific, but officials said the receptacles were particularly bad for the environment and could be mistaken by marine life for food when they reached the ocean.
The tiny bottles were “easily dropped, blown away, or washed into drains”, South Australia Deputy Premier Susan Close said in a statement.
Even when the bottles landed in recycling bins, they were “too small to be captured by sorting machinery and often end up in landfill or as fugitive plastic in the environment”, she said.
Instead, restaurants were required to use larger bottles, refillable condiment containers or what officials said were less harmful single-use alternatives such as sachets, squeezable packs or compostable vessels. The ban covered fish-shaped or rectangular containers that had lids, caps or stoppers and held less than 30ml of soy sauce.
