What’s next after plastic bags ban?
Martin van Beynen/ Stuff.com
As you would expect from a curmudgeon, I have lately found myself feeling nostalgic about the plastic supermarket shopping bag.
It’s one of those cases of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone. All major supermarkets have jettisoned them in recent months before new rules take effect in July banning the bags.I knew public opinion had shifted when I did a bit of shopping at the Pak’nSave close to work late last year and was walking back with a couple of yellow plastic bags filled with groceries.
I suddenly felt guilty or slightly embarrassed in case someone saw me. It wasn’t that I was ashamed to shop at Pak’nSave or that I was walking instead of driving or riding a Lime scooter.It was more the worry that I would be seen as environmentally unsound for still using the plastic bags.
In other words, completely irresponsible and uncaring about the difficulties later generations will face on this planet.
I’ve had a pretty good run with plastic bags. They’ve been great for holding wet towels and smelly running gear, for providing a wrap for leaky containers with the leftovers of last night’s red curry and being a useful receptacle for mussel shells and other odorous remnants. Mrs VB always had a few plastic shopping bags in our beach things so that she could pick rubbish off the beach while I lounged in the sun.
And they were reusable. Incredibly, they were just the right size for lining the kitchen rubbish container and had handy handles for easy removal. The bags were also good for collecting pine cones for the fire and horse manure and seaweed for the garden.These new jute bags are great but you don’t feel the same about throwing them away.
That is not to say I am not a strong advocate of looking after the environment.I have always been a keen recycler, compost maker, public transport user and waste minimiser. But I sort of think banning plastic bags is like fighting a raging bush fire with a garden hose.
I don’t wish to diminish any individual effort to reduce pollution because moves towards big changes start with small steps. But if environmental devastation is as close as the experts say, only drastic changes are going to do the trick.
Those changes will involve such fundamental alterations to our lifestyles that putting our shopping in reusable bags will seem like token gestures.The plastic shopping bag ban is instructive because it illustrates that social change is not only possible but tolerated when a tipping point is reached.
The great conglomerations of plastic waste floating around in the oceans do not come from New Zealand or Australia. We have stopped cutting down our native forests, unlike poorer and more corrupt countries. We are hardly the industrial powerhouses like United States, China and Western Europe that belch out the majority of the world’s carbon (and of course form our major markets).
We can be an example to the world but that tends to be expensive.