It's time to turn off the pollution tap, stop single-use plastic
Thursday, 2 August 2018
I can’t believe how difficult it is to get this point across. How long will it take until Kiwis finally get it?!
I recently watched a news segment about plastic bags where they interviewed scientist Michelle Dickinson - who I am a big fan of - but I am literally frothing with frustration.
We at “Bags Not” have been saying the same thing for four months now and we will continue to say it until we are blue in the face, or until the message finally gets through.
The whole plastic bag issue, more specifically, the single-use plastics issue for that matter, requires a change of behaviour not just a change of materials.
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I have to say I am actually blown away that so many people just can’t get their heads around this. Instead they continue to discuss the environmental impacts of plastic bags versus paper versus cotton and so on. Paper is worse, cotton is worse, and thicker plastic is worse.
People often say, “oh, if it’s made out of cotton I have to use it 170 times.” Yes, that’s exactly the point because we just have to change the single-use behaviour.
How many times do you wear your shoes? Or use your phone? Or wear your underwear?
You use those items hundreds, maybe thousands of times (I’m thinking of your phone, not your undies). Imagine the state the world would be in if we used all of those items just once. But let’s not talk about fast fashion just now.
The question is, why has it become socially acceptable to use plastic just once? Using your plastic bag again as a bin liner does not justify its use, plus you don’t need to line your bin - I encourage you to try it and see if the world ends.
Plastic pollution is arguably a bigger issue than global warming, and right now there are wildfires burning in the arctic circle. That’s how bad this crisis has become.
Plastic is a synthetic material that nature has no way of dealing with and recycling plastics is a completely broken and wasteful process.
Globally, over 300 million tonnes of plastic is produced but only between nine and 15 per cent of it is recycled each year.
Once recycled, a large amount of energy is used to collect, transport, shred and melt down the plastic before turning it into a new shape. But once it has been transformed, it is still a synthetic material that nature has no way of dealing with or breaking down.
Recycling plastic is simply an emissions-expensive process of delaying the inevitable. The fact of the matter is that all plastic will eventually pollute our soils, oceans and waterways.
It shouldn’t be called plastic, it should just be called pollution.
If you saw an oil spill you would call that pollution, so think of plastic as solid oil that has spilt all over our entire planet.
Did you know that microplastics - plastic that has been broken down in nature to smaller pieces of pollution - have been found in drinking water, bottled water, beer, salt, honey, fish and soil? It has pretty much polluted everything.
How we get it out of the environment and restore our planet back to pre-plastic times (which is only around 60 years ago, on a planet that is over 4.5 billion years old), I just don’t know.
I have to admit, sadly, that I don't think we can ever get it back to that time. We are simply going to have to tell the children to trust us, once upon a time there was no plastic in our water, but don't worry because our rubbish bin is clean.
But before we bother trying to get the plastic pollution out of our soils, oceans and waterways, which many people around the world are trying so very hard to do, we have to stop making it.
We have to, figuratively, turn off the pollution tap.
For some uses, it is going to be a harder task to find a solution. I'm mainly thinking of medical uses, long-life food packaging, and hard plastics we use for electronic appliances (known as thermoset plastics) to name a few.
That may be a case of only using recycled plastic or using different materials, I don't really know.
But, in the meantime, we have got to stop using single-use plastics. Bags, bottles, cotton buds, cigarettes butts, lollipop sticks, takeaway packaging and so on.
There is so much pollution that has been designed and manufactured solely for single-use, which is a mere fraction of its entire lifecycle.
Does anybody else see the stupidity in that?
So logically, the solution for single-use plastic bags is to take a reusable bag shopping - always, but this of course requires learning a new behaviour.
The utopia position is that every New Zealander has a bag, or two or three, that are made from some sort of natural material such as cotton, hemp, flax, plant sugars, or leather, or even better, a natural material that has already been used for something like clothing or curtains or is leftover material from another industry.
Those bags are then treated like our shoes, phones or undies. They are used hundreds or thousands of times and then eventually when they are falling apart, we put them in a compost so they can return to the soil.
That’s the circle of life and how life has been rolling for three billion odd years. There is no waste in nature and we have to live within that model. That’s why the world is so out of balance at the moment, we are trying to fight that circular model.
So, the key now is for everyone to learn that new behaviour and remember to always take a bag with them. Before you leave your house, grab your keys, wallet, phone, and reusable bags.
There's no doubt it will take time because learning new behaviours and creating new habits always takes time.
It took me at least six months before I no longer had to hold my shopping in my arms as I left a shop (not just supermarkets) because I forgot my reusable bags, but I got there in the end.
Keep in mind this would have been around five or more years ago when we would receive a plastic bag to carry chewing gum!
However, today, we could make it a whole lot easier and quicker for New Zealanders to learn this new behaviour. We could create a nationwide campaign around remembering to take a bag shopping.
Actually helping Kiwis remember by providing them with simple and practical tips and tricks. Some of these tips could be putting your bag straight back in the car, writing “bags” on your shopping list, or keeping your shopping list in your bags.
But if you did happen to forget your bag one day (we're all human after all), well there could be the option of a bag made out of plant material at the store that you could borrow (perhaps with a refundable deposit) and then return for the next person who one day forgets.
Hey, guess what… There already is a nationwide campaign guiding Kiwis on this journey of change we simply all have to go on. Oh, and there are already bags being provided by stores for you to borrow and return.
But I guess we'll have to wait for someone to tell us about it on the news before we listen.
Nick Morrison is the Co-Founder of Bags Not.