Three words which you can use to help save the world...

No Bag Please


Repeat after me, lets practice;

No Bag Please
No Bag Please
No Bag Please
No Bag Please
No Bag Please

You might need to say it in different ways, like quickly......., oh no bag please........

or slowly, N o B a g P l e a s e

You will almost always have to say it more than once, "No Bag Please", repeat with smile, "NO... BAG... PLEASE..."


You may have to hold up the queue, (don't worry because this is allowed.)

You may have to take back out all of the 5 items which the cashier has just stuffed in 5 plastic bags and put them all into one. You will normally at least have to take out the lettuce, which was on top in the basket and so is now getting squashed in the bottom of the bag, and put it in the top of the bag.


The important thing, is to keep on repeating your new mantra;

No Bag Please

No Bag Please

No Bag Please

No Bag Please

No Bag Please

You can practice in your car, or in the shower, you can do it. Believe in yourself.

There is a bit of preperation involved. The less technical of you may find this a problem.

You have to try to keep a plastic bag with you at all times.

Men have crossed continents and gone to the moon. I bet you don't go out the first time you look to get laid without a condom? Work on it like that.

It did take me a while to perfect, I admit.

The bags that is.

Now I carry two.

You need to find a place where the plastic bags live. Mine live in the front pocket of my handbag. They used to live in the dashboard of my car when I had one, which I don't any more.

Plastic bags and packaging suck.

It's a fact. FACT. You know, like you will not be likely to improve your health by smoking cigarettes, or 9 out of 10 women going for cosmetic surgery have low self esteem.

Plastic bags and packaging, really suck.

I was discussing this with Dave, a Canadian guy I was house sharing with a while back. We were saying how you can seriously reduce the amount of packaging you use, just by not picking it up in the first place. Here in the UK you have little polythene bags hanging on dispensers all around the supermarket fruit and veg department, and you find the same thing most places in the world.

The thing is you don't need to put an onion in a plastic bag, it comes in it's own skin, a ready made package of cellulose, but everyone does it anyway. Other things which you don't need to put in a plastic bag in my opinion are, carrotts, potatoes, peppers, broccoli, garlic, courgettes, aubergines, bundles of green beans......

Even the green beans will not grow legs and run for it.

They will sit in the trolley together, quite happily, and the cashier will pick them up in one handful, and they will go in your, hopefully reused, carrier bag in one handful. Oh and by the way. The cashiers don't even blink when I do this. Those at the supermarket seem to be different to those in a flurry of bags at fast moving tills. Either that or they're onto me.

Dave told me he doesn't even use plastic bags for his tomatoes. So I stopped too.

The fact is the more I think about it the less packaging I pick up. I have about 10 plastic bags in my life and they're like old friends. I'm sure I've even got one from Asda in Roehampton somewhere, and I moved from there in August.

More facts about plastic bags:

1. Plastic Production uses 8% of the world's oil (Waste Online)

Forget bitching about the figures. Plastic bags are made from oil (and other stuff), oil is a petrochemical, petrochemicals are by definition hydrocarbons. You know, that stuff that cases global warming.

2. Plastic bags go into land fill. They are not taken away in the majority of recycling schemes in this country. I have yet to see a domestic scheme that takes them. This will be either because they produce a low grade product when recycled that is not very useable, and/or because of the cost of collecting them up, (petrol, lorries), and melting them down (heat, energy), is greater in financial and environmental terms than the recycled product is worth.
(Please do correct me if I am wrong.)

The answer is, don't f***ing use them in the first place.

As an aside if we carry on putting waste in landfill at the rate we are, we will have literally no room left for it in this very small country of ours by about 2050.

Oh yeh, biodegradation.

3. Plastic bags don't, biodegarde that is. Plastic, put very basically is designed not to biodegrade. Plastics take between 100-1000 years to biodegarde. The most opptimistic estimates I have seen on a bag degrading is about 20 years.

Even then they fail to return to there organic elements in the same way as wood or paper do. They kind of disintegrate into a million little pieces, and float around in soil and aquatic systems, thus making there way into the food chain which means animals, including us end up eating them.



4. The UK uses around 2.8 million tonnes of plastic waste every year and this figure is rising by 2% a year.
(www.newport.gov.uk)

Sounds like an unimaginable figure to me, but you know how much you use right? I read somewhere that if you laid all the plastic bags used in London in one lunchtime end to end, it would be enought to stretch in a straight line all the way around planet earth.

But that's not what really pisses me off.

What pisses me of are the easy things.

What pisses me off, is how some people will still throw everything in the normal rubbish, even when they have doorstep recycling. When they throw stuff in the bin which is recycleable, even when the rubbish bin is sitting right next to the recycling box.

When they do not use their recycling box as there is "no room for it in the kitchen". When they leave there heating on full whack all winter with the door wide open for ventilation.

When they seem to be in a competition to gather and throw out the biggest quantity of plastic bags in the whole world.

It is not easy to cook all your food from scratch. It is not easy to use absolutley no packaging at all. It is not easy to stand at the bus stop in the rain on the way home from Tescos, foregoing your car if you have three toddlers to control.

But it is, really, really easy, to say,