the bags
Thursday, April 30th, 2009The first time I visited England was 1978. I can’t remember what it was I was buying from some shop in London, but I told the bloke serving me that I didn’t need a bag.
He looked at me as though I’d grown a second head.
I shrugged. ‘Save a tree,’ I said.
‘They’re plastic,’ he said.
‘Save some, uh, petrol, then,’ I said.
I checked to see if I had grown a second head, on account of the way he was looking at me. I took whatever thing it was that he’d sold me and put it into my handbag.
Why in hell did I need another bag? In the past thirty one years I have had iterations of that exchange on more occasions than any sane person could be bothered counting. I have had arguments with shop assistants, I have had them put my thing in that bag anyway, and I have stood at the counter and removed my thing from their bag and handed their bag back to them.
There are without question many reasons why the bag is a good idea: multiple things, things small that might get lost, things that need extra protection.
plastic soup
There are millions of tonnes of reasons why the bag is a bad idea. To say that plastic bags are an enviornmental disaster is an understatement of epic proportions. As well as the whole business of them clogging up the insides of sea-animals and looking bloody awful as they moulder away by the side fo the road, they suck up resources just being made. I admit that the report I got these facts from is a little out of date, having been put together in 2002 and had a whole sentence revised in 2006, I can only assume that things have got worse since then, though. So back when the Plastic Shopping Bags – Analysis of Levies and
Environmental Impacts was put together, Aussies were sucking down a lazy 6.9 billion plastic shopping bags a year. That’s roughly 1 bag per person, per day and that’s an awful lot of bin-liners. It also cost something in the vicinity of 2540 GJ to make them, and left us with 8.62 million cubic metres of litter, which is roughly 5 MCGs worth. A metric arseload, if you want to get technical.
Did I mention not being a huge fan of the plastic bag? Yes, they do have their uses, but there’s just no need to go nuts over them. Basic, stupid little things. I go to the supermarket. I put grapes and nuts and stuff into plastic bags (this kind aren’t actually part of the 6.9b in the study). I find that just dumping these things into my trolley is a futile exercise, makes the floor slippery (in the case of grapes) and too much of a challenge for those little trolley wheels (in the case of nuts) and I finish up with far less stuff than I’d originally planned. But why would you need to put oranges in a plastic bag, and then into another plastic bag at the checkout? Or bananas or avocadoes or pineapples or carrots or any of that stuff that you’re going to peel anyway?
The thing is, switching away from plastic bags is not exactly your life-changing experience. It’s not going to break your brain, it’s not going to cost you a fortune, it’s not going to radically change your lifestyle. But it will make a difference.
Did you know that in the North Pacific there’s a new continent forming? It’s called the trash vortex and it’s made of plastic bags.
ocean of plastic
Recently one of the supermarkets where I regularly shop was part of a government experiment where customers were required to pay for their plastic bags. A nominal amount, 5c, I think. I don’t know because I very, very seldom use supermarket plastic bags. It must have been in the week or so following the end of the experiment that I went in there to buy something to have for lunch at work. Since I work in the same shopping centre and didn’t have far to carry it, I said I didn’t want a bag.
‘It’s okay,’ the girl said. ‘You don’t have to pay for them any more.’
She couldn’t have been more wrong if she’d tried.
ps kudos to Germany, where in 1992 you had to pay for plastic supermarket bags. Kudos to Aldi, who have always had a “pay for bag” policy. Kudos to Bunnings, who, like Aldi, supply cardboard boxes from their packing for you to put your stuff in (thus also cutting down on their landfill) and don’t supply plastic bags at all. And today, good news from Target.