Why "No Plastic Bag Day" is Flawed.

"I'm leaving your junk planet for good. Goodbye!"

Don't get me wrong. I'm all up for environmental awareness. And I appreciate that people are doing something about it nowadays - but I don't think this "No Plastic Bag Day" campaign is going to solve any sort of environmental problems in the long run.

The Local Agenda 21 introduced the "Sunday is no plastic bag day" campaign last year as part of an effort to reduce non-recyclable waste, and starting with 2010 there will be an extra two more days per week as "No Plastic Day", which falls on Friday & Saturday.

The idea is that it would "create awareness among the public on the dangers of expansive use of plastic, reduce or minimize the plastic usage ".

In fact, it was originally thought there should be an outright ban involving plastics. Fortunately, they opted a stage-by-stage progression to reducing plastics slowly.

And here's why this idea is flawed; plastic bags are by default, quite useful. People will use leftover plastic bags to wrap trash in bundles and throw them away as this method creates a reasonably tidy trash heap for collection to landfills. Assuming that in a world without distribution of plastic bags by shops, people won't have anything to wrap their trash with. So at the end of the day, the people here will still go out, buy the huge black plastic trash bags to throw their trash in. This is already happening; I have personally seen people doing just that.

And then we're back to square one; people will still be using plastic bags to throw their trash in, and then throwing them away into landfills. So instead of a landfill that's full of little white/pink plastic bags with logos on them containing trash, the landfill will be full of large black plastic bags also containing trash. There's still plastic.

So, really, what was the point? Surely, they have generated an environmental awareness that plastic bags are bad for the environment - and then at the same time - the consumers might get inconvenienced when they go shopping, and had no other practical choices but still go out to buy plastic bags for their trash.

Will these people use the expensive and small (and sometimes very pretty) environmentally friendly cloth shopping bags that cost RM4.00 each to wrap their trash in? Or do they just dump their trash in pieces in the trash bins instead of in bundles of disposable bags, and have the trash strewn over all the place when it's trash pickup day because it's mishandled by the garbage truck guys (as is always the case)?

Funniest of all, on the other end of the spectrum, most consumer products that are sold around here are still wrapped in stupid amounts of plastic. One example of this can be found in a particular box of cookies I purchased : each and every piece of cookie is wrapped & sealed in little plastic bags, themselves sealed in a larger plastic wrapping! Such copious amounts of plastic, and it is us - the consumers - that have to pay the price to "keep the environment clean"?

Almost all of the trash & un-environmentally friendly plastics generated are still from packaging of the products we use every day. Why did they start the environmental thing at the wrong end - us, the consumers - instead of the manufacturers? Not that consumers don't need to do anything, as I'll mention about them later, but let's put it this way; basically everything on environmental messages has pretty much been put onto them. That's a lot of pressure, and when there's pressure you can be sure that there will be some resistance.

The resulting thing here is that we won't make much difference, with possible exception that the people who profit most are the "environmental bag" manufacturers. And Earth loses. And when Earth loses, it is our next generation that will see the full brunt of the impact as a result. You know, the stuff that we learn from movies - such as that the Earth would fall off its orbit in 2012, bounce into the Sun, melting cute fluffy baby Polar bears and obliterate us all because manufacturers keep churning out products with stupid packaging.

So which end should we start with? It is the manufacturers that should really take the action FIRST. They should start with environmentally friendly packaging and designs, and then this would result in less trash - and less plastics - that consumers will automatically produce, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint for everyone.

But is there no solution for the plastic bags? Well, I have some ideas, certainly not groundbreaking ones, but at least it's something. In that order.:

1. Biodegradable plastic bags.

Looks like plastic bag, smells like plastic bag, crinkles like plastic bag, holds things like plastic bag, but biodegrades. Simply swap it in place and we will continue using it, but it will be truly environmentally friendly.

Uh, yes, such things do exist.

The trick is to get the people to change. To know that there is such a thing. To manufacture such bags. To use these bags and distribute it to the supermarkets. To consumers, it will be as if nothing has changed, but we will sleep better knowing that we use biodegradable plastic bags and Earth will be a better place tomorrow, hopefully. I would assume, however, such bio-plastics are expensive to manufacture and sell - so it might be a hard sell to grocery shops / supermarkets. Once used to wrap trash with, then thrown away, the outer layers of the biodegradable plastic bag will degrade, leaving its trash center to decompose. Assuming that the trash is biodegradable as well, then it will be all good.

That would certainly be a better start than beating around the bush about enrivonmental bags and its messages and at the end of the day people going back to plastic trash bags.

Learn more about biodegradable plastic bags.

2. Get manufacturers to take initiative.

Remember the stupid cookie packaging I mentioned above? The manufacturers should be coming up with different ways of environmentally friendly packaging - to reduce the amount of plastic used, or utilizing biodegradable plastics and things like that. There's no point in trying to "create environmental awareness" when the manufacturers still churn out products that use excessive plastics and unnecessary wrapping.

Also, these manufacturers can change in a variety of ways to lead as an example in the environmental awareness, and not just with less packaging. This can also be something as simple as a more wel-lit factory/offices to use less lighting, to something as complex as a whole new approach to gravity-assisted assembly lines, using less electricity and creating less pollutants. But how they go about it is up to them, as long as they take the initiative and not just throw environmental buzzwords around for marketing purposes.

3. Get consumers (that's us) to recycle. Don't laugh. Really. Now.

People in Japan are in the habit of sorting out the trash to plastics, glass, paper/cardboard and many other categories; this includes cloth, burnable items, etc. If they can do it, why can't we? We aren't a totally modern society yet like Japan is, but at least we need to start somewhere.

Of course, the push for recycling was already very well handled by the Council, as we can all see the kind of effort that went into sorting out recyclable trash and disposing of them correctly, and I applaud their efforts. So now we get to the consumers. Get them to recycle effectively at home by sorting out their trash before disposing them, and coupled with the use biodegrable plastic bags, our Earth will still be called 'Earth' in the future and not 'Trash'.

So, what I am trying to say is what we should be seeing is not "No Plastic Bag Day" but it should be "Use Biodegradable Plastic Bags Everyday" instead! Who'll take the initiative to really change this perspective?

And I'll be doing my part in this recycling, would you?