Plastic bags

Plastic bags have always reminded me of toxic, urban jellyfish sailing around in swarms. They are a listless trouble with nowhere to go but landfill, river systems and the guts of animals.

In some places, like the rubbish-tip slums of Manila, they get a second life as they are pulled from the debris and recycled, but elsewhere we never reach out to stop them, we just watch them float by on their way to somewhere else. Of course the people of Manila and the like would find something else to recycle, or some other industry, if it wasn’t getting plastic bags out of the muck. Honestly they don’t need them and nor do we. Why is it only in desperation that our fellow humans go to such as effort to make use of them while we, in our comfort zones, grab them and throw them away with impunity instead of putting our minds to finding a better alternative?

The answer to this question makes me think that plastic bags are also not just the bearers of bad news, they are like bad news in many ways. They are unpleasant, stay with us briefly and continue causing trouble somewhere else long after we’ve forgotten them. Do we watch plastic bags drifting past us in the same way as we view the news of global troubles? We could chase after them and do something to try and make the planet a better place by dealing with them, but there is so much rubbish flying around where do we start? It’s much easier to let it all go by and leave it to someone else to deal with.

Plastic bags are both a manifestation and a symbol of our unwillingness to deal with world problems as a human race. We know we shouldn’t use plastic bags, we should ban them but we don’t. We know there is no real reason in our abundance for poverty, starvation and war, but as societies we don’t stop this. We know in many places plastic bags make the quality of life far worse for our poorest brothers and sisters, as well as our animals and flora, but we still keep using them.

We should be able to put our heads together as a species and come up with some biodegradable alternative easily enough that sees an end to the slag heaps, the burn offs, the dead albatrosses’, dolphins and rivers, the wasted oil and the thousand-year land-fills, but we don’t. Maybe it’s just that they aid our consumption, they are forgettable and we can’t do anything ourselves to stop them being a problem, once we’re done with them, so we toss them aside like bad news, and move on to the next thing.

Australia, a nation of twenty odd million, uses around four billion plastic bags a year. Two hundred bags per person each year, not counting plastic wrapping and the rest. How do you not get dispirited and give in to using bags yourself when two hundred a year less from you would be infinitesimal?

We can build bombs to blow up the world a million times over but not make a biodegradable plastic bag. There’s a missing motivator here that’s not just about blocking out ears at the news of calamity or kicking a chip wrapper into the gutter. It’s one that speaks of us as human beings and our willingness to tackle serious problems when we don’t feel under the immediate pressure to save our skins.

Can we make changes for the good in times when there is no great menace? Can we use times of peace, prosperity and safety to makes strides for a better world as great/or greater than when we are forced to deal with crises?

A history professor of mine used to invite students to select objects in the classroom and then explain what war produced either them or their materials. He told us Napoleon invented canned goods (Coke anyone?); the CIA invented the internet (selfie posted from class) and so on.

My professor’s point was that we don’t throw ourselves and resources into solving big societal problems unless someone puts a rocket up us, literally. To him, advancement was only a response to crisis or the need to get the upper hand in conflicts. The kick back for societies as a result being a lot of neat new stuff spun off from the military into benefits for civilian life. We let the captains of industry get what they want- Iraqi oil, Timor’s gas etc; we watch the drama our taxes fund from a safe distance; and in the end some of the stuff our militaries use, to do the job, gets reinvented and we get voice-activated internet specs as a result. What we don’t get is a solution for saving the Orangutan or the Amazon, from ourselves and our plastic bags.

We have had a War on Drugs and a War on Terror but not a War for Resources Alternatives or a War for Species Preservation. What matters more in the long-run? If it’s the latter then I guess we have to think about what sacrifices we are to make, instead of other people sacrificing for us, to conquer these calamities.

Why don’t we start with plastic bags? Can’t we have a war on them and throw the resources of the CSIRO or inventively-supported private industry into developing a natural silica or vegetable by-product that would make biodegradable bags and sort out the land-fill, petroleum waste and wild animal death problems they cause? Is there enough urgency within us to say this is something we need to face up to and defeat before it’s too late? Are plastic bags more of a threat to our way of life than Saddam Hussein was?

At least we have no trouble finding the implications of their danger, unlike the threat we were told Saddam posed. We don’t need plastic bags. We could always carry cloth ones or find environmental alternatives if we felt a sense of urgency around the impact they pose to the comfort of our lives. Let’s do this before we find ourselves watching a future war on our hologram TVs while the garbage trucks empty our bins full of plastic outside and the world loses another Orangutan.