By PlanetPlasters - September 7th 2020
Why they don't want to ban plastic bags
AAre you sick of hearing about plastic bags? For the last 20 years, governments around the world have been implementing a range of measures to reduce the number of plastic bags we use – no bad thing of course – and whatever measures governments have put in place have generally worked. According to government reports, the UK alone has seen a drop of 86% in the distribution of plastic bags by the major supermarkets since the 5p charge was introduced back in 2015. Something to celebrate!😀 ? Well… Yes & No!
If it looks like a step in the right direction, is it? Well for one thing, if we fill our eco-friendly bags with plastic packaging on meat, vegetables (cucumbers – really??) and fruit (yes, bananas… if only nature had devised some kind of wrapping for them…) then the amount of plastic in our eco-friendly bags literally (and figuratively) outweighs the old plastic bags we used to take from the supermarkets. And even with a drop of 86%, that’s still a lot of plastic bags being distributed: no less than 3,429,690,652,192 plastic bags have been produced at the time of writing (September). Yup, that’s exactly what I thought!
Never mind – at least they can easily be recycled! 😀 Or can they…? Theoretically, plastic bags can be recycled, but then again, so is playing golf on Mars! Ask anyone in the know who’s not making a killing (you decide if that’s literally or figuratively!) from the fossil fuel industry: only a tiny percentage of them actually end up being recycled. Why’s that, when millions of consumers dedicatedly place them in recycling bins after use? Unfortunately, they require special recycling facilities to sort and process them, which is why most of those even sorted for recycling end up in landfill or in our oceans, where they can become a wind-assisted polluting parachutes. On top of killing millions of marine animals every year, these bags eventually sink, breaking down into billions of microplastics, polluting the furthest reaches of our oceans.
The question is, does anyone REALLY want to ban plastic bags? Well… yes, and no! Consumers are supportive of bans, and governments want to be seen to be taking action on plastics, so plastic bags become the convenient and ever-popular whipping boys, while shoppers are leaving stores with more plastic in their (eco-?!) bags than ever before! So the focus on bags promoted by the media – and complicit social media – is nothing but government greenwashing: facile tokenism at its worst.
Whenever there’s a national outcry about the billions of tons of plastic in our environment, we see the usual suspects hauled in front of the jury for sentencing: levies, surcharges, taxes, reduction targets – anything that will convince people something’s being done. Recently, the UK announced they were going to hike up the price of plastic bags from 5p to 10p... an easy target in its fight against plastic waste – maximum publicity, minimal effort. Job done! The bag survives for a flogging next time around. Thank God for the plastic bag! Forget flags of convenience, these are bags of convenience – for greenwashing governments!
Have a nice day? I know what an animal would say if it swallowed it... and it wouldn't be thank you😁
Photo: Griffin Wooldridge.
The point is, while everyone is concentrating on plastic bags, attention is being diverted away from the real problem… what fills our bags in the first place: single-use plastic packaging. Check out your local supermarket, almost everything is packaged in single-use plastic.
Rather than trotting out the usual suspects, we need to tackle the elephant in the room, or rather in the bag! It’s not about the bag, it’s about the plastic, and it’s set to quadruple over the next decade as the fossil fuel giants scour the earth for a new market for their oil. Still, hard times for everyone I guess… so should we just give up and watch our planet turn into a furnace? Absolutely not. We need to take action… NOW! If governments won’t do it, we will. With PlanetPlasters, the future’s in your hands!
Cover Photo: Muhammad Abdullah
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