Our illustrious leader Gordon Brown clearly sees banning supermarket plastic bags as a popular ‘green’ movement to hang his coat on. It would seem to be a nice and simple move to ban disposable plastic shopping bags unlike the various disasterous events that have haunted his period as PM so far. A ban is probably seen as a move with little downside. If there was consumer resistance you can use the green argument and say that plastic bags are throwaway items and throwaway items are wasteful of natural resources which of course they are.
If removing the plastic bag from society were the answer life would be nice and simple but of course this is simply the tip of a very large iceberg. The truth of the matter is that the plastic bag you carry your shopping home in is almost irrelevent in terms of using environmental resources. Many people reuse them for all sorts of uses. I personally use all the bags I get as bin liners for my kitchen waste bin.
It is what goes in the bag that is the problem. All the waste materiels you get when you have unpacked your shopping, the tomatoes that might have been shipped in by air from Spain, or Egypt or Chile. Strawberries out of season flown in from the southern hemisphere. There is just so much STUFF.
If Gordon Brown wants to show he really has green credentials he needs to lead a change of mindset that stops and thinks about what we buy and where we buy it from. We have been encouraged to think that buying new stuff all the time is good for us and good for the economy. It certainly generates money but good for us? Hardly. There are as many if not more unhappy people around now as there were years ago before all this consumerism came along. New TVs don’t make people happy. They give us a brief moment of elation as we get our new toy but that feeling soon fades. We are much like our children and we would get as excited and almost as much satisfaction from playing with the box as we get from the new toy that came in that box.
We don’t need to worry much about the plastic bag. The amount of material used in the making of them is negligable and their environmental impact can be reduced through the use of bidegradable versions. It isn’t the bag we need to worry about. What we should be worrying about is the fact that the contents of the bag have had a lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere to get it in the shop for us to buy and put in our plastic bag and most of the time we don’t need them.
This is the tragedy of the environmental crisis we face. It isn’t that we have damaged our planet to get food for our children. We have damaged the planets ability to support life so we can have new and bigger cars, new abd bigger tvs, newer fashionable kitchens replacing one that was only put in a couple of years ago, trips to foreign countries for stag nights and strawberries at christmas.
It hasn’t made people happy and it has caused immense damage to the environment we depend on for life itself. We may already have done too much damage for human being to survive in the future, only time will tell, but as an epitaph we will be able to read. Here lies the human race. A wonderful opportunity wasted by greed for money and material things.
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[...] society today is the consumerism that has fed it so well for the last few years. The issue of the disposable plastic bag may simply disappear with a ban on the issue of free disposable bags but the problems of the [...]