Top tips and plastic bags
George Marshall of COIN wrote a provocative piece about whether re-using plastic bags and other small actions are helpful when it comes to doing something meaningful about climate change.
Now he is right to point out that re-using bags has a very small effect on overall carbon use. He acknowledges that there may be other benefits – a few turtles won’t die as a result of confusing plastic bags in the sea for jellyfish.
So can we consign the idea of re-using bags and similar “simple tips” to the recycling bin? And chastise the Government and anyone else who promote them for diverting us from the serious business of responding effectively to climate change.
Or is there more to it? Several bloggers have pointed out that by encouraging people to start with simple actions you may them to move on to more demanding ones once they’ve realised what’s at stake and have a better understanding of what’s actually required.
What strikes me about plastic bags is that when we re-use bags today, it’s the big supermarket chains that make most the savings. We do the work, and the supermarkets reap the benefit. So there’s an imbalance there. Especially if you know that £100m or so is spent each year on these bags.
So my version of re-using bags is to have local communities strike a bargain with supermarkets. If the community re-uses bags, then the community gets some of the money that’s saved. For example, if students in a school pester their parents to re-use bags and the school gets funding for energy efficiency measures or renewable energy technologies etc. If you can save 20% of bag use, then this could be £20m a year!
But there’s more. One great advantage is that people immediately see the point; you take resources – the bags - that would literally go in a hole in the ground and turn them in to something useful – renewable energy installations or whatever. This is a very powerful message about how we confront climate change – we have to use resources much more efficiently. Only that way we have a high standard of living but with lower carbon use.
And more …. If we had a branded “Green Bag” then this would be advertising for the campaign on every high street in the country. The campaign snowballs.
I like your thinking. But the first part of your post worries me:
“George Marshall of COIN wrote a provocative piece about whether re-using plastic bags and other small actions are helpful when it comes to doing something meaningful about climate change.
“Now he is right to point out that re-using bags has a very small effect on overall carbon use. He acknowledges that there may be other benefits – a few turtles won’t die as a result of confusing plastic bags in the sea for jellyfish.”
It saddens me to think that climate change is the only environmental problem people seem to be concerned about. And the fact that more than a few turtles could be saved is irrelevant.
Now, I am not a radical animal rights activist who believes that animals have more rights than human animals. But I also don’t believe humans have the right to destroy other species to satisfy our overwhelming need for convenience and material consumption, just because we can.
I do care about those turtles eating bags and the albatrosses eating plastic bits and the pollutants entering the food chain due to the high concentration of plastics in the oceans. I believe that our lives are connected with theirs and that by destroying them we are slowly destroying ourselves, with or without global warming.
So while I do think we need to find clever ways to get people to “see the point,” it also saddens me that the deaths of thousands of animals are not point enough.
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