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Fighting the wrong fight

Life would be so much easier if we’d taken a detour a couple of million years ago and wandered down the evolutionary path followed by marsupials for just a little while. Long enough to develop a pouch instead of a paunch. But we didn’t.
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Life would be so much easier if we’d taken a detour a couple of million years ago and wandered down the evolutionary path followed by marsupials for just a little while. Long enough to develop a pouch instead of a paunch.

But we didn’t.

Nor did we swim with the octopi long enough for our gene sequence to embrace the very useful idea of forcing us to sprout more than two arms.

And I don’t even want to think about where we made a wrong turn and lost the prehensile tails enjoyed by other of our primate ancestors.

Two hands, no pouch, no tail. Is it any wonder prehistoric homo sapiens developed a natural affinity toward bags? How else to carry the stuff of life?

As we grew smarter — stick with the assumption here; we’ll get to the moral judgements later — the stuff of life proliferated at a dizzying rate until, for many of us, hardly a day goes by during which we don’t accumulate something. Often as not, we bring it home in a bag.

Bags have evolved as well. No longer do we lug our stuff back to the cave in animal skins, blowfish lungs, beaten and woven cedar pouches and baskets or clay jugs balanced gracefully on our heads.

Paper or plastic?

Increasingly, at least on this side of the border, the choice is plastic or plastic. I can’t remember the last time I was offered paper. Not that I’d take it anyway. Not after passing within the rank pall of the kraft paper plant in Fort Francis, Ontario and the shaved stubble of clearcut forests that have been pulped from sea to sea to sea.

I don’t know whether plastic bags are the lesser of those two evils but I do know the solution is not as simple as banning either of them. I’m sorry AWARE has chosen to march down that path; sorrier still to be opposing them in that undertaking.

There are numerous problems to overcome in adopting the simplistic — and possibly unrealistic — position that plastic shopping bags should be banned from our happy resort municipality. For starters, it violates Whistler’s equivalent of the prime directive. It amply inconveniences tourists. Tourists are not going to pack cotton, hemp or other cloth shopping bags with them when they come on holiday… at least not in sufficient numbers to stock their little condo-away-from-home with the necessary goodies to put the happy in happy hour. They’re not going to schlep them along when they pop into one of our many retail outlets to make impulse purchases. They are going to need an alternative to get their stuff from store to storage and they aren’t going to want a consciousness-raising lecture with their purchase.

And lest we forget, Whistler is all about tourists.

Okay, so tourists aside, there’s no reason why locals can’t do the cloth bag thing, is there? Well, no; there isn’t. But that doesn’t really solve the problem big picturewise, does it? Plastic shopping bags are only a slice of the plastic as waste and plastic as litter problem. Maybe not even the biggest slice.

Before we move on to more meaningful solutions AWARE might want to champion, indulge me while I explain how I’ve come to an accommodation with my own war on plastic bags.

Slavishly following the triangular circle drawn by the three Rs — reduce, reuse, recycle — I’ve reduced my usage by dutifully packing cloth bags and generally toting a knapsack with me. It took almost a year to get into the habit of actually having the cloth bags in the car when I drove to a store and most of a second year to remember to bring them in with me. I backslide to this day. Blame it on my 1960s memory.

One of the things that would jog my memory, reduce my backsliding towards zero and make me increase the number of cloth bags I’ve accumulated — who’d have thought five wouldn’t be enough — would be for stores to charge me for plastic bags. Not two or three cents, something more substantial and more reflective of the actual cost of dealing with the lifecycle of the bag itself, what economists like to term externalities. I’d only have myself to blame and I’m certain such a charge would do wonders for my memory.

But that’s only one R. I have a very cool garbage bin under the kitchen sink. When I open the cupboard door, the can swings out and the lid stays put. Even better, it’s just the right size to use grocery store plastic bags. So that’s what I do. It doesn’t make any sense to me to ban bags to bring my groceries home in when one of the things I’ve bought at the store is, you guessed it, plastic bags to line my garbage can with. Why use virgin plastic when I can reuse a bag that’s already been used once before?

Mindful of the third R, some of my grocery store plastic bags, albeit a greatly reduced number now that I use them for kitchen waste, get recycled. The bags I take other recycling — paper, glass, cans — to the compactor site get tossed into the plastic recycling bin. If I manage to accumulate an excess of bags, they go to my local, summertime library where they get used to tote books home in by patrons who don’t bring a book bag.

Nothing gets used once and tossed “away”. Grocery store bags replace garbage bags.

But that’s still not good enough.

What will be good enough is when the plastic bags I use and you use and, more importantly, the ones those unrequited slobs who still think the three Rs are readin’, ritin’ and rithmetic use are made exclusively from biodegradable or compostable plastic.

What’ll be even better is when compostable waste, including the bag it’s thrown away in, is composted. Last week’s announcement of Whistler’s new composting initiative is a welcome step toward that goal. That’s because the real problem with plastic bags isn’t that they don’t biodegrade in landfills — nothing biodegrades in sanitary landfills; that’s the whole point of landfills — it’s that they don’t biodegrade as litter. They last forever, a blight on the landscape, a danger in water.

So if AWARE really wants to fight the good fight, lose the campaign against plastic bags. That’s so Nancy Reagan. Mount the battle against nonbiodegradable, noncompostable plastic bags. Fight for a bag fee. Fight to make the local food service industry adopt the kind of packaging Slope Side Supply is now offering instead of Styrofoam. Take on a really big dog and fight against bottled water and for more numerous drinking fountains redesigned — think art in public places — so people can refill their own bottles from them.

These things will have a meaningful effect. Bans, Just Say No campaigns and Zero Tolerance initiatives have already proven themselves to be more form than substance.

Sorry to disagree.