China bags the plastic, Aussies to do the same

Leigh Pomeroy

Every time I go to the store, I bring my own cloth bags with me. Well, not every time. For we do use those store plastic bags as garbage can liners (why pay for them when you can get them free?) and paper bags for our recycling. So periodically I do take them.

My wife isn't as anal as I am on this, so every few months we find ourselves with a surplus of plastic bags, which I then dutifully take down to the library — which gives them to patrons to protect books on days of inclement weather — or to our local coop food store.

In short, I hate throwing the things out.

Yes, there are recycling bins for plastic bags at the supermarkets, but I suspect that the cost of remanufacturing them into some other sort of plastic item, including transportation and energy use and everything else in the equation, is not much of a net gain for the environment. So the best option is, once the bags are made, to get as much use out of them as possible.

Now China and Australia are planning to ban them altogether. According to Reuters,

Chinese people use up to 3 billion plastic bags a day and the country has to refine 5 million tonnes (37 million barrels) of crude oil every year to make plastics used for packaging, according to a report on the Web site of China Trade News (www.chinatradenews.com.cn).

San Francisco has already instituted such a ban, as has the eastern African country of Tanzania. Other political units are considering it, including Boston, Santa Barbara and Annapolis, the islands of Oahu and Maui in Hawaii, London, and Bengal, India.

Last year, Modbury, UK, gained a certain kind of notoriety as being the first city in the European Union to take such a drastic step. Unlike San Francisco, which has long been known for its radical leanings, Modbury is "a horsy, farmy town that's always been very conservative," says Rebecca Hosking, a wildlife camerawoman "who came up with the idea in a local pub one evening."

Coastal cities are perhaps the most inclined to institute controls on throwaway plastics, as the world's oceans and beaches have become a literal plastic dumping site. Few landlubbers realize, for instance, that in the middle of the South Pacific is the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch —

a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash — which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers — floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

As we all know, "twice the size of Texas" is pretty damn big.

While most of the time I bag my own groceries, periodically I end up in a store or checkout line where there is a young person bagging. Usually I load my cloth bags first on the checkout conveyor, so they are the first among items to arrive at the bagging area. (Some stores even give me a whopping five cents credit per bag!) But even then the young bagger out of habit calls out, "Paper or plastic?"

"I have my own," I say, whereupon the bagger notices the clump of cotton bags and begins to load. Sometimes they even say, "That's cool!" or something like that.

My father made his living connecting chemical companies making plastics with manufacturers using them. If you see a plastic boat, surfboard or skateboard, my father had something to do with its development. Because of my father's involvement in plastics, my friends never ceased getting a chuckle out of that famous advice that Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) receives in The Graduate.

My father even was somewhat instrumental in the development of Botts' dots, those raised circular or rectangular bumps put on lane dividers on highways, as one of his jobs was to usher around the somewhat dotty Dr. Botts while the chemists were trying to figure out the best adhesive to use for gluing them to the road. (The original dots where affixed to the road with spikes, but they would come out, creating a "slight" hazard for innocent tires.)

Despite my father's lifelong connection with plastics — or perhaps because of it — he was an ardent recycler, be the material plastic, metal, glass, paper or garden clippings, which he meticulously composted. I have gotten this from him, which hopefully makes up for some of my more wasteful flaws.

All this said, ridding the world of plastic bags is not the issue, for plastic bags can and do have a place. The issue, rather, is ridding ourselves of our current habits of overproducing, creating waste and using up increasingly scarce resources, which even a kindergartener will tell you cannot be maintained forever: You have a bag Skittles and you eat them one by one. Eventually they'll be gone, and all you'll have left is the bag, which you can't eat. Or rather, you can eat it, but it doesn't taste very good and probably isn't very healthy either.

Once we've used up this planet and turned it into a waste pit, we can't go to the store and buy another one. And that's why China's move to ban plastic shopping bags is a step in the right direction.

For further information on this subject read "The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global" in Mother Jones and Lester R. Brown's latest book, Plan B 3.0.