Plastic Bags
Single use plastic bags are a plague for the environment, there’s no doubt about that. Taking 500 to 1000 years to decompose, they’ll probably still be in landfills, not to mention on streets or in trees, long after the human race will go extinct, at the rate we’re going. Yet most shoppers never think about that, considering only their availability and ease of use. Stores hand them out for free when you make purchases, so you don’t need to plan ahead and bring your own. Doesn’t even matter that you end up with piles upon piles of them at home, until you run out of storage space, fill a few of the larger ones with the others and throw them all away. No, most people obviously consider anything that makes them need to think less to be a good thing.
Thankfully, that very availability is slowly going away, in spite of protests from big business and even some consumers. There are many countries that are considering taxes on them, while in some, like Ireland, the taxes have already been in place for quite some time. But yet others are taking it even further and banning them completely. Bangladesh made a first attempt at it over five years ago, then Zanzibar brought it into focus and several small towns all over the world followed suit, then San Francisco put the issue on the front pages and now Boston is considering it as well.
Yet, excepting the UK, all of this seems to pass right by EU member states. Not only that, but the use of plastic bags is even enforced in some areas!
What made me write this entry is the annoyance I feel at all the very thin, transparent little plastic bags that pile up in the bread drawer of the kitchen cupboard. That happens because every loaf of bread comes in one of those, and that in turn happens because a law requires it! And correct me if I’m wrong but I think it’s an EU regulation, not just a Romanian law.
You read that right, bread needs to be stored and sold in those little plastic bags, supposedly in an effort to reduce contamination in case it is dropped before it gets on the shelf or touched by dirty hands. Some places still refuse to use the bags, and many fines have been handed out because of this, but most seem to comply. What I’m wondering is what happens if the loaf of bread is dropped before getting on shelf, which is when it’s usually put into a bag? Or what if the person putting it into the bag has dirty hands and no gloves, or dirty gloves? Or, since the bags aren’t closed in any way, what’s stopping people from touching the bread afterwards anyway, or what’s stopping the bread from falling out of the bag if it’s dropped? Not to mention that some understand compliance to the law as putting the bread into the bag right when the customer purchases it, therefore making that annoying little bag serve no purpose whatsoever.
Honestly, except littering even more and causing the bread to mold sooner, is there any point to this?
I really think we must reduce the use of plastics in general, and plastic bags especially, as much as possible and as soon as possible or we’ll end up choking in them just like that turtle and those albatross chicks… But how can you get rid of them on a large scale when lawmakers keep putting economy over environment, next month over next decade?
