Make a difference: Say no to plastic bags

My family's plastic horror story lurks under the kitchen sink: a frothy volcano of supermarket shopping bags spewing over the sides of a wait for it commodious green eco bag.

Not a great look, but in my defence, the flat-bottomed eco bags are versatile and the plastic bags are collected to be recycled: one a day to line the rubbish bin; two or three a week to lug the forests of newspapers and magazines out to the footpath for collection, and one or two for transporting smelly gym shoes or beach towels.

Of course it's a lame attempt to salve my conscience: 10 times more bags go in than ever come out. And the ones that do will end up in the bin/landfill eventually.

So in a week where this newspaper is asking New Zealanders to join the international chorus demanding action over "plastic poison" starting with the ubiquitous plastic shopping bags it seems fair that the editor should expose her eco sins.

I am the first of five volunteers to monitor weekly plastic consumption, identifying both the easy changes and the obstacles we face making bigger ones.

The lessons I learned are predictable and dull. But they have forced me to make some changes.

Lesson one: No breakfast without plastic. Our fridge is a shrine to plastic and modern food preservation: butter, milk, yoghurt, hummus, pesto, Anatoths jam, cottage cheese etc, all lined up in plastic pottles.

But bottled water? Inexcusable. Spoilt by Canterbury's world class water I slipped into the nasty habit of buying bottled water when we moved to Auckland. My son has shamed me into stopping this. Instead I keep a glass bottle of tap water spiked with lemon zest in the fridge. I've stopped taking a water bottle to the gym, using the water fountain instead and at work I've swapped the polystyrene water cooler cups for a glass.

Lesson two: Paper bags aren't a patch on plastic. We try to buy our meat and produce from the local butcher and fruit shop, so I get the butcher to wrap the meat in brown paper and forget the plastic bag. But the only paper bags in the vege shop are limp little things designed to hold a handful of mushrooms.

I ask the shopkeeper whether she'd consider swapping to paper bags, but she explains paper bags are not strong enough, produce falls through, and customers on foot need bags they can carry. Defeated, my brown paper parcel of meat ends up piggy-backing home with the fruit and vegetables in a plastic bag. They might use four times more energy to produce and 85 times more to recycle but they are strong, light and easy to carry.

Lesson three: doing the right thing takes more time and effort. Most of my eco sins are committed in the kitchen. Gladwrap, small plastic lunch bags, kitchen tidy I reach for them automatically to cover food, store leftovers, clear scraps that can't go down the waste disposal. That convenient metal mouth is itself probably an ecological nightmare, but since moving into a rental townhouse we no longer have a compost.

For a week I make a determined effort to use glass jars instead of plastic to store food. It is a pain fossicking around in the pantry to find a clean jar with a lid that fits.

Lesson four: Impulse shopping and plastic are made for each other. We know the trick to reducing careless consumption of plastic bags is to make sure we have enough eco bags in the car for the weekly grocery shop. But what about the shameful "mini-shops" on the way to or from work? It never crosses my mind to bring an eco bag with me when dashing at breakneck speed into a dairy or petrol station.

And that goes to the heart of the matter: plastic, in all its guises, is convenient. Change means inconvenience. It requires forethought and work. It is an investment in an invisible future. It's too important to leave to sloths like me.

Make us pay for plastic bags and stamp them with a clear environmental warning: this bag will still be around in 400 years.

Cate's questions: Can plastic yoghurt, hummus, cottage cheese containers be recycled? Is anyone supplying really strong paper bags and are they an economic option? Are insinkerators really, really bad? What's the alternative for townhouse renters with no garden?

Email: makingadifference@star-times.co.nz