Plastic waste

‘I’ll just chuck it in my backpack’.

That’s what I said to the cashier in Albert Heijn, the biggest Dutch supermarket on the streets of Amsterdam.

She had tried to charge me .50€ cents for a plastic bag so that I could carry my bunch of bananas 100m down the road. It was more than the bananas themselves had cost.

As an Australian, my initial thought was why on earth do I have to pay for my supermarket bag? Coles gives me as many bags as I need for free. In fact, most Australian retailers will hand over an item dependent sized plastic bag every time you make a purchase.

I put my bananas in my backpack and walked home to avoid the .50€ cent fee. While I was walking home, I realised that a plastic bag was a completely unnecessary and wasteful resource to supply me with. I also realised that while a lot of Australians are environmentally conscious, out of habit, we still accept plastic bags to move our groceries from A to B.

Europe has nailed the concept of minimising plastic wastage when it comes to bags. All fruit is packaged in paper bags (not just the mushrooms) and often retailers don’t give you a bag with purchase. International companies like Apple have gone even further and use emails to send receipts after purchase. This technique is an exceptional way to minimise paper usage and keep everything electronically filed for future reference. It’s resourceful, and saves you searching for your paper receipt months down the track when your computer battery unexpectedly fails.

The plastic bags we are receiving from the supermarket are often not biodegradable and they are not environmentally friendly. It’s the ‘single use’ bags that we use to transfer groceries from the shop to the car that are the problem. We use them once, and then throw them in the bin.

While the life of these bags is relatively short, the environmental impact they cause is enormous. They are energy-intensive to produce and their lightweight texture causes them to float away when left outside. Then they end up in the ocean, choking marine life to death.

South Australia have been the first to crack down on plastic bag pollution, banning the bag in 2009. We need to follow their lead as the rest of us rely on these bags without thinking. If supermarkets started charging for bags, people would think twice before leaving the house. Charging people for bags means they are still available if necessary, but the use of them would reduce significantly.

Canvas bags are the perfect environmentally friendly equivalent. They are stronger, bigger, reusable and easy to store at home. If we are able to minimise plastic waste in supermarkets, we will save money, time and a whole lot of energy.

The next time I went to the supermarket, I bought a backpack to carry my goods home. And I did this every single time I went to the supermarket for the next 7 months. Think about how many plastic bags that little old me – a one-person show, saved in that time. (I calculated – it was about 84 bags!)