These dull decorations brought me precisely zero cents worth of joy or festive feeling. But what proportion, I wonder, of the small yet astronomical cost was incurred in their printing? In saving the planet we are cutting down trees to make grocery bags upon which we are now inking tiny trees. How far we’ve come! They used to cost around 10c.
I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t you take your own bags you muppet? The answer is quite simple. I forgot.
I often do. I suspect many of us often forget. And before you know it you’ve spent a week’s wages a year on piddly paper bags that couldn’t hold a slippery wet two-litre milk bottle to save themselves. They’re about as reusable as a condom.
How much profit are the supermarkets making here? The Woolworths website insists it doesn’t profit from paper bags when packing pre-ordered online grocery orders. It simply adds a $1 charge to each order. It doesn’t mention profit margins on individually purchased paper bags. Hmmmm. Suspicious.
I was now officially triggered. How many of the plastic bags we Kiwis bought from supermarkets actually ended up in the ocean to begin with? How many turtles have we saved? How much has our overall plastic consumption reduced by? The answer is we don’t know, none and it hasn’t.
When the previous Labour Government introduced the bag ban we were promised, “The ban will stop millions of single-use plastic shopping bags from entering the environment each year. This will benefit our waterways, ocean and wildlife.”
I suppose that must be true but we’re a drop in the ocean. Literally.
A report last year estimated there are now 21,000 pieces of plastic floating in the sea for each human being on earth, which is 170 trillion pieces in total. A team of international researchers found the amount is doubling roughly every six years.
Much of it enters waterways via Third World countries for whom environmental tokenism is not high on the agenda.
This is the fundamental problem with costly environmental policies: public buy-in.
Whether it’s an Emissions Trading Scheme charge on petrol or farmers, the ute tax or runaway cycleway invoices; the issue with getting us on board with paying to fix the planet is the fact we’re such a small part of it.
It hardly seems worth the expense or effort.
Donald Trump’s drilling for oil, Xi Jinping’s opening coal-fired power plants and petro-state Azerbaijan is hosting a climate change conference which everybody flew to (including Chlöe Swarbrick, may I add).
So why can’t I, for the love of all that’s fair and just in this world, get a plastic bag for a few cents to carry my milk home in one piece?
