Packaging: it’s in the bag
* Plastic bags a-plenty
* Protect yourself against marine life
* Bespoke packaging for your veg
Every worthwhile campaign needs a symbol. WWF has a panda, Friends of the Earth hides behind an ambiguous green circle and yours, well yours could be a plastic bag, emblazoned across the middle with the phrase ‘I am a plastic bag’. An exemplary choice, you’ll agree. A transparent ‘thank you’ to the profligate waste, packaging and food miles of the supermarkets, whose unswerving determination to ruin the planet has, at times, been quite humbling. There is no more superior icon of Europe’s impulsive throwaway culture than the plastic carrier. Innumerable bags bearing your symbol will turn up on remote mountains and beaches the world over, a none-too-subtle reminder to nature that you are here and you mean business.
Hardly Gaia’s buddy at the best of times, supermarkets have been a superbly reliable ally, helping you to carry home your shopping conveniently in one of the 13 billion plastic bags handed to Britons each year. The UN claims that 20,000 pieces of plastic litter rest snugly within every square mile of the planet’s surface. Come back next year and there’ll undoubtedly be more. Scientists have calculated that 46,000 pieces of plastic, many of them bags, swirl around in each square mile of ocean. Environmentalists widely claim that more than a hundred thousand marine mammals are killed by plastic in the sea each year. In the future, when sharks are caught and their innards sifted for human remains, scientists will hardly raise an eyebrow to discover nothing but balled-up Asda bags. You need never be scared of the sea again. Wade in bravely armed with a couple of carriers to double up as a flotation device and a convincing anti-shark solution. Jaws would have been quite a different movie with some plastic bags on the scene.
Estimates suggest it can take up to a thousand years for a plastic bag to disintegrate, which means only one thing: they’ll be flapping about long after you’ve left town. Their beauty is not only their long-lastingness but also their ability to photo-degrade, poetically breaking down into smaller toxic bits able to contaminate soils, waterways and oceans. If you succeed in trebling the pieces of plastic found in every square mile, soon every throat and gullet in the animal kingdom will know what it means to choke on a plastic supermarket bag. One day, the landscape will glimmer with plastic while, in the oceans, jellyfish will find themselves out-numbered by lifeless plastic blobs, the spitting image of themselves. What a sting.
Nature, admittedly, has done a sterling job in wrapping fruit. In some ways the banana is fast food, nature’s way. Encased in a protective coat, easily carried and with a simple to operate zip-and-eat design, evolution has made a pretty decent fist of it. As always, though, humanity holds the trump card. And as you wander round your local supermarket, there it is, the banana, laid out in a Styrofoam tray, a plastic film sealed snugly around its bent frame. A polythene-coated delight. You pick it up, followed by a sprout from New Zealand wrapped in its own spherical little package and, finally, an Argentinian avocado, unnaturally shiny from its plastic shrink-wrapping. At the checkout you are asked if you want a plastic bag for the three items. You nod. ‘Three please.’ You exit the supermarket and empty the bag’s contents in the bin outside. Britain chucks away 3.3 million tonnes of food each year and here you are feeling grumpy that you’ve only thrown away 2 kilograms. Still, Every Little Helps. You sashay over to the end of the crowded supermarket car park, hold all three carrier bags in the air and release. The average usage of a plastic bag is eight minutes, yours clasped consumer culture for just thirty-three seconds. They embrace their emancipation. One snags on a tree and billows like a flag, another scurries across the tarmac like urban tumbleweed. You re-enter the supermarket. Emboldened, this time you buy nine bananas-in-beds-of-plastic, thirty-three foreign sprouts and seventy-eight Argentine avocados. You ask for 120 bags and wrap each item individually, explaining politely that you are in a hurry as the duty manager apologizes for the delay in bringing your entitlement of extra bags. On average, a Briton uses 216 bags a year, but you are keen to beat that pathetic figure in less than an hour. This time you release the bags above a small brook at the rear of the supermarket. You go home radiating satisfaction. In total you have released 319 plastic bags above a pretty English market town. The smug feeling soon wears off as you realize that mild despoliation is all very well, but isn’t quite enough to achieve large-scale degradation and planetary suffering. You want to make a difference to the planet.
You pick up the phone and dial China. You ask for Suiping Huaqiang Plastic, the country’s biggest plastic manufacturer, but it has recently closed because its government has banned ultrathin bags. And quite right too. Who wants to be scrabbling for groceries when your defunct plastic bag splits halfway down the Portobello Road? Undeterred, you try Shenzhen Delux Arts Plastic, in Guandong Province, which makes 25,000 carriers a day, a fifth bound for Europe. You check the bags are made from polyfabric petroleum. One of the many joys associated with plastic carriers is that they are, ostensibly, made from crude oil. An estimated 12 million barrels of oil are required to make the 100 billion bags produced each year. Satisfied that you have met mandatory obligations, you place an order for 250,000 of your personalized bags. You offer £17,000, around 5 pence per bag, plus shipping costs. While waiting for them to navigate the 8,000 miles to your home, you contemplate the other uses of plastic bags. You know, pulling over one’s head when David Attenborough comes on TV, tying one over a car-parking meter and writing ‘broken’ on it in large letters. But no, yours have a more important destiny.
When the bags arrive, you pack them into your family SUV, drive to Land’s End, and with the help of your children, release them above the North Atlantic. They billow away across the ocean like a beautiful cloud of white balloons. You turn away and imagine what would happen if the ocean currents rearranged themselves to create a vortex of plastic rubbish the size of South Africa. Somewhere between California and Japan this already exists – it is known as the North Pacific Gyre and fondly termed the ‘Plastic soup’. That night your dreams are laced with images of tortured whales, seals, tuna. Anything really, anything that adds to the tally of 267 marine species known to have suffered because of plastic-bag entanglement or ingestion. Those chaps at arch-enemy Greenpeace have indicated what might be possible. When their trawler, the Esperenza, hauled in a 1-metre net from the middle of the Atlantic, they discovered almost 700 minuscule plastic fragments, including flakes from old plastic bags, and a few nurdles, white pellets like grains of rice, used liberally by the packaging industry. In every place the experiment was repeated, a rich assortment of plastic was fished out.
Gordon Brown must have been appalled. In his first major speech as prime minister he described plastic bags as the ‘most visible symbol of environmental health’. Even so, he has managed to resist the temptation of outlawing the principle of free bags for all. Britain is increasingly alone in caring for its consumers. Sweden has charged for bags for more than a decade. In Germany, shoppers have long expected to pay for them. At the time of writing, Brown has sensibly refused to endorse a bag tax to be included in the climate-change bill. Doing so would only increase government costs. In 2007, Whitehall bought 1.3 million bags purely for the purposes of promotion and for disseminating valuable marketing messages. No doubt some were also used to lug about consumables which could then be claimed back on expenses – once the politician in question had returned from their second home overlooking a bag-strewn coast, that is.
Of course, there would be some vegetarian sandal-wearers who narrowed their eyes as you carefully bagged up your single shrink-wrapped sprouts. Relishing your intellectual authority, you tut loudly at the biodegradable bag they have lugged with them to the counter. What a pity that it is also bad for the environment. Another well-kept secret – shhhh – is that these, too, can ruin the planet. Ethical alternatives offered by Tesco are little better than your Chinese-reared numbers. Degradable bags are still made from plastic and so still require oil. They also end up in landfills, where the sheer volume of rubbish makes it impossible for any of them to break down and so, instead, they release that laudably potent greenhouse gas, methane. Switch to paper bags, by all means. They use even more energy to manufacture than their plastic pals. Fabric bags, made from hemp or canvas, may last for years but take up vital agricultural land for growing food. The overriding message should be that carrying stuff around in whatever is the decent thing to do. And don’t forget that plastic bags are popular for a reason. They are good at holding a few groceries. And they are as adept at soaring about in the heavens as they are at drifting in the sea. And they don’t cost a penny. Yet.
* Bag backlash grows apace in 2009. Plastic becomes the new pariah. Reports of people being spat at in the street for carrying supermarket bags. Free bags become as rare as real fur. Shoppers forced to queue in their cars right up to supermarket entrances in order to ferry food home. Imaginable.
* A truly biodegradable mass-consumer shopping bag is invented which is both cheap and not made from oil. Maybe.
* Last surviving lesser-spotted wombat found choked to death on a Morrison’s bag in southern Kerala. Within days Queen’s corgis are strangled by stray Dixons carriers. Unlikely.
* European legislation bans free bags. Possible.
* Shoppers buy more plastic bags than ever even after 5-pence price tag becomes mandatory. Annual numbers sold reach 220 billion by 2015. Probable.
Likelihood of plastic per square kilometre trebling on land and sea by 2020:40%