“DON’T tell me it’s a ‘no plastic bag’ day,” said an indignant Mrs Lee to the poor cashier at our local supermarket. Then she added, “again!” as if to emphasise her displeasure.
ECO-FRIENDLY: Brown paper bag as an alternative to the plastic bag.
That’s the problem with plastic. It is so good that we feel we cannot live without it. Let me run through its list of ‘goodness’. It’s light, strong, cheap, malleable, versatile, waterproof … and durable. In fact it is so durable that it is almost indestructible.
Wait a minute; don’t the numerous benefits outweigh the one single flaw? Why should it be a problem? Indeed, describing something that can virtually last forever as being flawed by virtue of its durability seems to be such a contradiction.
It reminds me of a story told by many a motivational speaker. A teacher made a small black mark on a pristine whiteboard. She asked the students what they saw. All the students said, “A black dot.”
“Ah, you only notice the small black dot but don’t you see the expanse of white space?” She proceeded to lecture the students on the human weakness of focusing on the negative and the odd blemishes while being blind to the abundance of good that is around us.
I am afraid as regards to plastic, this lesson doesn’t cut it. Plastic may have oodles of benefits but ironically, its strongest attribute – durability – is a bane and can ultimately prove to be calamitous to the world.
Last week, I was in a supermarket, thousands of miles from Kuching. It is a small city called Bozeman (approximately 40,000 population) in the state of Montana, USA. As I was standing in the line waiting to pay for my purchases, I saw a notice by the cashier. It read, “Today is ‘no plastic’ day.” Wow, talking about deja vu. As my eyes lingered on the sign, my mind drifted back to the supermarket scene in Kuching, Mrs Lee and her protestation. A member of the staff, noticing that I was staring at the sign, gave me a copy of the local newsletter. It carried an article by film maker Warren Miller.
He wrote: “In the 70s, for a change of scenery from producing ski movies, I secured the contract to produce a travel film for Micronesia Airlines. My job was to make Micronesia as attractive as Hawaii, but with a lot fewer people.”
Miller sent an advanced camera crew to take stunning pictures of beautiful white, sandy beaches. It was stunning all right. The crew was stunned by the sight of the beaches completely covered with junk and polluted by all matter of floating debris. The production manager had to hire a team of locals to help him clean up the beaches before a single frame could be shot.
I did a double take. That was in the 70s! I believe we have been dumping indestructible stuff, and with increasing intensity, into our oceans in the last 40 years.
In 1997, Charles J Moore, an oceanographer and racing boat captain, was returning from a boat race in Hawaii when he sailed through an area about twice the size of Texas, which was a huge island of plastic garbage, made up of tens of millions of floating water bottles and any other kind of floating debris. (Land size: Texas – 696,200 square km and Sarawak – 124,449 square km).
“As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean,” Moore later wrote in an essay for ‘Natural History’, “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” An oceanographic colleague of Moore’s dubbed this floating junk yard ‘the Great Pacific Garbage Patch’.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not the only collection of debris in the oceans. There are a few other such thrash vortexes being spotted in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. While some of the debris might be biodegradable and disappear over time, plastic does not. Thus an overwhelming percentage of the collected rubbish is plastic. Plastic can virtually last forever. Though exposed to the elements, through a process known as photodegradation, it will just break down into smaller and smaller pieces and drift around in the ocean, as deep as 300 feet. Eventually some of it would be ingested by marine creatures, fishes and birds. Sometime ago, an albatross was found in the central Pacific, and plastic manufactured in 1940 was discovered in its stomach.
A percentage of the thrash is dumped by ocean-going vessels, but the primary source of the debris originates from land around the world, including Southeast Asia. It means that some of the plastic pieces in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch could very well have come from the plastic bags discarded by the Mrs Lees of Kuching.
Some of the supermarkets and at least one town council in Sarawak have initiated ‘no plastic’ campaigns. I am not sure how supportive the public has been to such enlightened gestures but a few months ago one gentleman was going around the major towns in Sarawak giving talks – claiming that such campaigns are misguided and that plastic bags are in fact more eco-friendly than the bio-degradable alternatives like paper bags.
I was rather taken aback by his stance and voiced my amazement to my friend Tim.
“Did you check the credentials of that gentleman?” asked Tim.
“No. I don’t know him from Adam.”
“He is the president of the Plastic Manufacturers Associations.”
“Well, that explained a lot.”
Apart from someone who is overtly biased and whose livelihood could be affected by the call for the reduction of the use of plastic, I also know that there are quite a number of Mrs Lees out there. The problem is that we are so far removed from the consequences of our actions. How can we make the mental connection of the careless discarding of plastic bags in Kuching with the ginormous garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean, which over time will spell disaster for our world?
Our myopia is further accentuated because we are distanced from the possible result of our acts by space as well as time. The Pacific Ocean is very far from Kuching and more importantly, the world that could be harmed by the build-up of indestructible garbage is not ours. It is the world of our children and grandchildren. As the Lebanese American poet, Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), wrote: “(your children’s) souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit …”
After reading the article by Warren Miller I had a chat with a staff member in the supermarket in Bozeman, Montana. He told me in America too it is not easy to wean people off plastic bags.
“We have to give them incentive.” He showed me the brown paper bag they issued as an alternative to the plastic bag. On its side was printed, “Receive 10 cents off your purchase for every bag you re-use.”
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