Today's consumer culture is often transient, cheap, replaceable and throwaway. Convenience has become one of the most important values to people, and that it why, perhaps, plastic bags have become the icon of the last two decades.
I remember shopping for a duffel bag last year. After making my decision and paying for the purchase, the salesgirl proceeded to stuff the bag into a big plastic sheath. What irony! A bag for the bag? Society had reached its limit and the bag, its tipping point.
Recently, my boyfriend returned from shopping, with bags upon bags of groceries. Hadn't my complaining and educating on the value of recycling had an impact?
After we put away the groceries, we were left with a mountain of clear plastic bags. I realized that I was fighting an uphill battle. The bags that I had been trying earnestly to avoid, had just reached epic proportions in my kitchen. I rolled the entire pile into a wad and tossed it in the garbage. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
With the close of the garbage lid, all my Friday afternoon jaunts to the grocery store, with my big reusable cloth shoulder bag, seemed in vain. It got me thinking, when something is free and accessible, how can we say no?
Reasons To Say NO To Plastic Bags
The truth is, we can't - even I can't - stop the bag addiction. And that's why people around the world should start pushing their leaders and governments to help legislate a ban on plastic bags. There are sound environmental reasons for doing so.
A bag costs fractions of a cent to make, but the environmental toll is immeasurable. When bags float out to sea, they become one of the top 12 garbage items that the shore cleaners find.
Countless dolphins die every year thanks to our habit. They die of plastic bag "overdose," as unsuspecting victims. The dolphins, who love jellyfish, swallow the intoxicating treat that resembles a jelly treat. But bags have no nutrition to offer. Their bellies get full, but only of plastic.
Try and think about all the places you have seen plastic bags – hanging from trees, blowing in the park, and bobbing about on the side of the road. Some sources estimate that we use 500 billion plastic bags every year.
If you see this in numbers it looks even more scary – 500,000,000. That's a million bags a minute, and 83 plastic bags per person, per year. Sadly, 100 billion of these are used in the US alone.
Social Responsibility
This reminds me about one of my first lessons on social responsibility and protecting the environment. The lesson on plastic bags came from an unexpected place – my grade 11 Physics teacher. Ms. Bernati was not an average teacher. She was gorgeous, athletic, and chic. And one of the brightest minds I have ever met.
But she unpopular with some kids, because she was stern and in some ways very tough – especially when it came to homework, and also the environment, I would later learn. One day in class she started telling us about how much garbage she throws out each week.
A bulk of our garbage, she told us, comes from the packaging and plastics used in food. For that reason, she would only buy food without packaging – meats and cheeses from delis – and always brought her own reusable containers from home. She would never take a store's plastic bags.
This idea made an impression on me, and it somehow, over the years, became something to strive for. Saying no to plastic bags? That was about 15 years ago. Have we gone anywhere since then?
How Some People Are Waking Up To Plastic Bag Pollution
In some cities and countries, plastic bags are now banned or heavily taxed. San Francisco was one of the first cities in the world to ban the plastic bag; and since Ireland has added a tax on them, their use has decreased by about 90%.
In some other European countries like Switzerland, not using plastic is a way of life. More than a decade ago, when I lived there, it was common and accepted for people to carry their own bags to the grocery store. In fact, if you didn't, your friends would look at you with disapproval.
Some argue that plastic bags can by recycled, but only one in every 200 bags, or so, ever makes it to the facility. In some countries, a biodegradable bag that decomposes after three years has been introduced. It sounds ideal, but the bags get broken down to methane, a greenhouse gas.
Corn bags are another option, but they break down quickly (sometimes too quickly) and are much more expensive, so few shops use them.
Want to break your plastic bag habit? If so, try the following tips.
Buy reusable shopping bags made from cloth (organic cotton is best); and even better, try and find an unused bag in your closet
If you still have plastic at home, try and reuse these bags as much as you can when you are shopping
If you must use plastic bags, buy the biodegradable ones, especially for your garbage bin
Refrigerate your food in glass containers, and not in plastic bags
Tell your friends how terrible and needless bags are (the story about the dolphins usually helps)
Chad Henderson sells reusable hemp and cotton shopping bags in Canada. In a recent newspaper story, he said that dumping the plastic bag habit is a good first step in cleaning up the environment.
"It's almost impossible to get a person to drive their car less," says Henderson, who cleans the shorelines regularly from plastic bag litter. "But here's this opportunity (to say), 'I can simply reuse my bags; that's what I'm going to do. It's much easier for them to take that on, than a much bigger issue like pesticides or car use."
Convinced yet? What are you going to do to bag your habit?