One of the first things 2017’s Labour / Greens / New Zealand First coalition government did was strongly signal its “green credentials”. First cab off the ranks was stopping new offshore drilling oil permits.
The second cab off the ranks was, oddly, single use disposable plastic bags….
Rejoicing in the collective kumbiya of the Green mantra of “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”, and thrusting the Circular Economy philosophy all over the place and into everyone’s faces (https://www.mfe.govt.nz/waste/single-use-plastic-shopping-bags-banned-new-zealand) the Government responded to the urgent need to ban the scourge of the environment, the supermarket plastic grocery bag.
It didn’t seem to matter that, in themselves, the bags were friendly little useful things. In fact, quite a few of the single use plastic bags I’d shared a brief relationship in the past didn’t have a mean bone in their body. Nor did they intend to throttle the snot out of some poor unsuspecting turtle.
Most single use disposable plastic bags only wanted to be useful for getting your groceries home. Once home, they were more than happy to be used as free freezer bags to wrap the meat up with.
Subsequently, once aforesaid meat was thawed, all the single use disposable bags I’d known (who incidentially had now been reused) were all perfectingly happy to be scrunched down and disposed in an appropriately issued council rubbish bag.
So the big beefy environmental issue wasn’t with the bags at all. These things weren’t pure raw evil made of cloroflorocarbons, all bent on environmental destruction and turtle snot-throttling.
The big beefy issue was how people disposed of them..… “other people”…
And, to that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage – responding to the children (https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/single-use-plastic-bags-be-phased-out) took an axe to the poor old sweet innocent grocery bag.
… and now, I find myself wallowing in a sea of angry non-single use, non-disposable grocery bags that seem to breed at the rate of a Tribble (TheTrouble with Tribbles)
I’m going to have to drive to the tip (in my diesel utu), because I’ve got too many of them, and they don’t compress down easy and fit into my council rubbish bag..
*sigh*
🙁