IT’S all very well for the Government and the Daily Mail and the Greens to pick on the plastic shopping bag, but my question is this: When they are banned, as will happen, what are we expected to wrap Sunday’s chicken carcass in?
You know, the one that sits in the wheely bin for two weeks in the summer getting smellier and smellier, until it is potent enough to knock out the binman like coal gas and a canary.
It’s a serious question.
A humble plastic carrier bag has a hundred household uses, for which we shall have to find alternatives.
Not only shopping, they will carry, hold or store almost anything.
Those things at the back of the cupboard that you have long since forgotten about but could not bring yourself to throw out, I bet they’re wrapped in an old placcy bag.
It is one the great inventions of mankind and it is ironic in an age of built-in obsolescence it is paying the price for lasting too long.
They reckon 1,000 years, which sounds suspiciously like a guess to me. It begs the question, how many years does the plastic used for presenting toys or Easter eggs and all manner of other goods – the sort of plastic you have to attack with a Stanley knife and a snarl – take to rot away?
Any advance on 5,000 years? But what are we doing about it? No-one wants it, but it won’t go away and that plastic has no further purpose other than to make up landfill. It is instantly shoved in our plastic big bags in our plastic bins, to hang around an eternity.
And what of the mini-plastic bag, the ones in which we tie up bio-degradable dog poo and thus render it good for a millennium. What will future anthropologists make of us? A generation of people who kept canine doings in little coloured bags, sometimes hanging them in hedges as a kind of offering.
We are seeing the beginning of the end of the plastic bag.
Marks & Spencer have been hailed as the planet’s friend because they are no longer giving them away, but charging 5p instead, thus cleverly turning the whole thing into a profit as well a PR triumph.
When all the stores join in, the price will double and the Government will collect millions in VAT. We’ll try and do without and the planet still won’t be saved.
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