Plastic bag use is on the increase and that's very disappointing. After a dip in individual bag use from 2002 to 2009, last year we were back up to getting through 475m a month. But that's so like plastic. Doug Woodring is a campaigner on oceanic plastic litter and the architect of a new "solution" called the Plastic Disclosure Project, in which companies report and reduce their plastic use, similar to carbon reduction programmes. According to him, the plastic problem snuck up on us, "with plastic waste building up in our environment without us really noticing".
Visceral manifestations of this are enormous vortices of plastic trash in the world's oceans; Woodring's team analysed the North Pacific Gyre (projectkaisei.org), thousands of acres of floating plastic in various stages of degradation (fragmented plastic is then ingested by wildlife). What troubles environmentalists is that the infrastructure for dealing with plastic waste is not equipped to deal with the huge surge in its use; and individual use is predicted to rise in Europe alone from 220 to 308 pounds a year by 2015.
According to UN research, 80% of the rubbish found in the oceans is generated on land, hence the importance of the annual UK Beachwatch clean- up and survey in mid-September (see more at mcsuk.org).
A few years ago in this magazine we analysed the rubbish of four families and found that, for example, 8g of oil is used to create an easy squeeze ketchup bottle alone, a single-use product destined for landfill. Green design asks that we look at resource use more intelligently. Plastic represents stored petroleum. The next generation of plastics will leave no stain and be recyclable. For starters we can use less plastic to make more.
What will these new plastic products look like? With any luck, not like those low-grade bags that cut into your palms and have a tiny chance of being recycled. After 40 years of mass use, only 10% of the 300m tonnes of new plastic made each year is recycled. When it comes to the estimated 5 trillion bags made annually the figure dips to 1%. Nobody loves a plastic bag.
Except perhaps Incpen, the council for packaging and the environment (incpen.org). It maintains that plastic bags are unfairly demonised, that restriction on their use contravenes EU directives and that there is no justification for restricting them on environmental grounds.
Plastic bags cannot be held totally responsible for epic oceanic littering, but to cast their unfettered use as a human right seems nonsense. Scaling back your own plastic footprint is commendable, and using a cloth bag is part of that. May yours survive for 1,000 shopping trips.