Plastic Bags

[bunn]

Nice to see that Modbury has banned the plastic bag: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1717476.ece

Or at least the local traders have anyway, and ISTR that Modbury has no supermarket.

However, all this fuss about carrier bags - all very well, but. It's the usual thing: make a big fuss about something that people can feel guilty about and they can buy a cotton bag and feel they are Making A Difference.

Yet every week we get bags and bags and bags delivered to our house containing unrequested mail order catalogues, leaflets, and other marketing materials. I actually recorded what was going into our bins for a couple of weeks, and the single largest amount of plastic by a long way was the wrappings from these unsolicited mailings. Of course we recycle the contents, but the energy involved in printing and sending all this stuff must be enormous, and you can't recycle the bags.
You can't even re-use them as they have no handles, they aren't clean enough for food, and they usually have little holes in so they aren't suitable as poo-bags*.

My family have always recycled. Well before it was fashionable to do so, we carefully sorted our rubbish and took it to a recycling facility, composted what could be composted, re-used wrapping paper and bags and all the rest. We had solar water heating panels installed back in the 1980s, and were early adopters of the first low-energy lightbulbs. I was paper recycling coordinator for my college. I am not uncommitted to energy efficiency and recycling as a concept.

But increasingly I am convinced that anything that relies on individuals all being careful in their own little way is hugely overshadowed by the massive carbon footprint of the people who will never bother unless the system itself is changed, and it just becomes easier to get it right than to get it wrong.

I strongly suspect that all my careful recyclings over my entire lifetime are as nothing compared to the sheer quantity of plastic wasted by, say Screwfix Direct on one mailing of their endless bloody catalogue. More and more mail order catalogues seem to be appearing: it is annoying when ordering from a website results in promotional emails for evermore, but how much worse is it then you get a pile of paper as well?

The current fuss about fortnightly rubbish collection is a similar thing. There is no reason at all that collecting rubbish fortnightly should mean that there is LESS rubbish overall. Rather than try to force millions of individuals to carefully think through and plan their purchasing decisions and household affairs so that they have less packaging to throw away, why not simply reduce the amount that goes into their houses by addressing the problem of the people who supply the stuff?

The Modbury model is the right one, in that it is led by the traders: it's not yet another attempt to guilt individuals into a huge series of tiny, almost pointless processes. Sadly I suspect that larger businesses will point to it and say 'we can't do that, they are only little, and we are BIG BIG BIG!'

Which may be true, but is no excuse for just sitting around taking the profits and not thinking.

*the environmental impact of poo-bags is something I shall rant about at some other time.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I fervently disagree with your last paragraph. Fortnightly collections are fine for people who produce a constant and manageable stream of rubbish. In my view they unfairly penalise people whose lives are less stable and predictable: for example those who have just had a new baby, done some house renovating, have just moved house, ill, been bereaved, or thrown a once-in-a-decade family party. They are particularly difficult for people who have limited space to store rubbish (and rubbish does take up more room if you separate it), and no car.

Yes, all those are situations where recycling is *possible*. But I'm really thinking now that important services like rubbish collection should not be about punishing the people that pay for them. They should be about enablement and help, and accepting that sometimes people just need a bit of leeway, and that maybe it would be easier to get the suppliers of the rubbish to help out than punish individuals for bad decisionmaking.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

A number of the examples you mention are very short term one-off. The system employed by Telford catered for those very things: you could 'phone up the council and say "we've done X and have got a bigger amount of rubbis than usual, would you collect it please". They would then make arrangements to collect that extra.

For people who had new born babies there were other similar arrangements. I didn't pay any attention to those as they weren't going to apply to us. However, disposable nappies are particularly evil.


The system they were trying to run wasn't about punishing the people who pay for them but it did include punishment of those people who abused them. Without some form of incentive people will just continue on in their own sweet way. People don't like change.

I'm all for leeway, but I'm also for responsibility. Just taking away people's rubbish and burying it in a hole is removing the responsibility of the rubbish from the people who are producing it. By saying we will take X volume of rubbish from you, and provide you with unlimited recycling puts the responsibility back to the rubbish producers.

I also fully support getting the producers of over packaged consumer goods to not package so much. In a thee pack of penguin biscuits do we really need three levels of packaging? A wrapper round each biscuit, a wrapper round a line of seven (or eight packaged biscuits) and a wrapper wound the three lines of packaged biscuits. That is just one such example, there are many others, suppliers of electronic goods are frequently appaling in this area.