No bag please

by Catherine Baker

Three words which you can use to help save the world...

No Bag Please.

Repeat after me. Let's practise:

No Bag Please
No Bag Please
No Bag Please
No Bag Please
No Bag Please.

You might need to say it quickly ('ohnobagplease') or slowly ('N o B a g P l e a s e').

You will almost always need to say it more than once. "No Bag Please." Repeat with smile: "NO... BAG... PLEASE."

You may have to hold up the queue (don't worry, because this is allowed.)

You may have to take out the 5 items which the cashier has just stuffed into five separate plastic bags and put them all back into one. You will normally at least have to take out the lettuce, which was on top in your basket but has now been squashed by the cashier into your bag's bottom.

The important thing is to keep repeating your new mantra:

No Bag Please
No Bag Please
No Bag Please
No Bag Please
No Bag Pleas.e

You can practise in your car, or in the shower. Believe in yourself. You can do it.

There is a bit of preparation involved. The less technical of you may find this a problem.

You have to try to keep a plastic bag with you at all times.

Men have crossed continents and gone to the moon. Think of it like this: I bet you don't go out without a condom the first time you look to get laid? It did take me a while to perfect, I admit. The bags that is.

Now I carry two.

You need to find a place where the plastic bags live. Mine live in the front pocket of my handbag. They used to live in the dashboard of my car when I had one, which I don't any more.

Plastic bags and packaging suck.

It's a fact. FACT. You know, like the fact that you're unlikely to improve your health by smoking cigarettes, or that 9 out of 10 women going for cosmetic surgery have low self-esteem.

Plastic bags and packaging really, really suck.

I was discussing this with Dave, a Canadian guy I was house sharing with a while back. We'd noticed you can seriously reduce the amount of packaging you use just by not picking it up in the first place. Here in the UK you have little polythene bags hanging on dispensers all around the supermarket fruit and veg department, and you find the same thing in most places around the world.

The thing is - you don't need to put an onion in a plastic bag. It comes in its own skin, a readymade package of cellulose, but everyone does it anyway. Other things which you don't need to package up in plastic are carrots, potatoes, peppers, broccoli, garlic, courgettes, aubergines, bundles of green beans... seriously, it's okay. The green beans will not grow legs and run for it.

These vegetables will sit in the trolley together quite happily, and the cashier will pick them up in one handful, and they will go in your hopefully reused carrier bag in one handful. Oh, and by the way, the cashiers don't even blink when I re-use my bag.

Dave told me he doesn't even use plastic bags for his tomatoes. So I stopped too.

The fact is, the more I think about what I'm doing, the less packaging I pick up. I have about ten plastic bags in my life and they're like old friends. I've even got one from Asda in Roehampton somewhere, and I moved from there last year.

Dirty facts about 'hygenic' plastic bags:

1. Plastic production uses 8% of the world's oil (Waste Online)

Forget bitching about the figures. Plastic bags are made from oil (and other stuff), and oil is a petrochemical, and petrochemicals are by definition hydrocarbons. You know, that stuff that creates global warming.

2. Plastic bags go into land fill

They are not taken away in the majority of recycling schemes in the UK. I have yet to see a domestic scheme that takes them. This may be because plastic bags are a low grade product that is not very useable once recycled. It could also be because the cost of collecting them up (petrol, lorries) and melting them down (heat, energy) is greater in financial and environmental terms than the recycled product is worth. (Please do correct me if I am wrong.)

The answer is: don't f***ing use them in the first place.

As an aside, if we carry on putting waste in landfill at our current rate we will have literally no room left for it in this very small island of ours by about 2050.

3. Oh yeah, biodegradation.

Plastic bags don't biodegrade. Plastic is designed not to biodegrade and takes about 100-1000 years to do it. The most optimistic estimates I have seen on a bag degrading are within 20 years.

Even then, plastics fail to return to their organic elements in the way wood or paper do. They disintegrate into a million little pieces and float around in soil and aquatic systems, creeping into the food chain... which means all animals (including us) end up eating them.

4. The UK uses around 2.8 million tonnes of plastic waste every year and this figure is rising by 2% a year.

(www.newport.gov.uk)

Sounds like an unimaginable figure to me, but then... you know how much plastic you use, right? I read somewhere that if you laid all the plastic bags in London in just one lunchtime from end to end, it would be enought to stretch in a straight line all the way around planet earth.

But that's not what really pisses me off. What pisses me off are the easy things. What pisses me off is how some people will still throw everything in the normal rubbish, even when they have doorstep recycling. When they throw recycleable stuff in the normal bin when the recycling box is sitting right next to it.

When they do not use their recycling box as there is "no room for it in the kitchen". When they leave their heating on full-whack all winter with the door wide open for ventilation.

When they seem to be in a competition to gather and throw out the biggest quantity of plastic bags in the whole world.

It is not easy to cook all your food from scratch. It is not easy to use absolutely no packaging at all. It is not easy to stand at the bus stop in the rain on the way home from Tescos, foregoing your car if you have three toddlers to control.

But it is really, really easy to say:

No Bag Please.

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