The British Prime Minister Mr Gordon Brown, well known for his wish to micromanage every aspect of peoples’ lives [ooooh, a bit political, that – Ed.] has launched a broadside on retailers who have no plans to curtail the distribution of plastic shopping bags.
It’s at times like this when I think that people have short memories. It is in the nature of things for people to imagine that the way we live now is as we have always lived, and that the foibles of the past belonged to some ineffably remote epoch, long before … long before … well, long before whatever it is we have nowadays (are you following this?)
A well-known effect of age is that the passage of time seems to speed up, so that the window of time which one perceives as ‘the recent past’ tends to stretch out. Whereas fashionistas, gossip-columnists, anyone under the age of about 14 and cell biologists will all regard anything that happened last week as ancient history (and last month as positively Jurassic, daddy-o), my mother’s phrase ‘the other day’ can be used to refer to any event from now back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not unconnected with this was, I suspect, the birth of my mother’s first child (i.e. me) six months earlier (though I refute any suggestion of cause and effect. JFK never knew my father, and neither did that bloke on the grassy knoll).
And that leads me to the point of this blog, if any. Back in 1962, many of the ills of the world with which we are currently afflicted didn’t exist at all. They are relatively recent epiphenomena of progress, and the world is now retreating, perhaps, to saner and more sustainable ways.
Back in the 1960s, you see, we were right-on and eco-friendly without even knowing it. In Britain at least, people were less likely to have cars (a recent habit we are only now beginning to break), and even if they did, did not spend their weekends driving to out-of-town superstores (which didn’t exist). No, my mother took me and my little sister on the bus to a branch of Sainsburys that was a kind of collective, with separate counters for separate kinds of produce.
My father, then as now a DIY nut, used to go to the kind of shops affectionately lampooned in The Two Ronnies’ Four Candles sketch, where you could buy nails loose, by weight, in paper bags – and not over-packaged in non-biodegradable plastic blister packs.
Air travel was a rarity except for the super-rich; space travel, mobile phones and computers were pretty much still in the realms of science fiction. Not just computers, either – Sinclair had yet to offer for sale even the most basic electronic calculator. At 11, I was in the last class at my school to be taught how to use a slide rule, and I remember marveling at the boy who brought in his new toy – a digital watch with an LED that you had to switch on to read the tiny red figures, necessitating two hands to tell the time.
Most pertinently, plastic bags didn’t exist – plastic grocery bags only came into general use in the mid-1970s—and Britain was still a brown-bag nation. My mother loaded her groceries not into the trunk of a car, but into a pull-along trolley basket. Despite the fact that such items are likely to be pilloried, these days, as the accessories of little old ladies, they are really a kind of precursor to the now-ubiquitous wheel-along suitcase. I predict that when people find that their cars are too expensive to run, they’ll press their wheelie bags into service, carrying bags of nails, paper bags full of produce and the Sunday joint back from the shops.
In the meantime, the 30-year age of the plastic grocery bag will be seen as the briefest of aberrations in modern commercial history.
Henry – I’ve really mixed feelings about free plastic supermarket bags. We more than reuse all the bags we get from the supermarket, as bin bags and dog poo collectors. If the green police insist that we can’t have plastic supermarket bags, then I’d have to buy my ‘bag for life’ (better known as bag for three months until it falls apart), and buy single use bin bags, and single use dog poo collection bags. Arguably my approach which has double use of each bag, is greener.
Incidentally, I know your overall rant includes other aspects of none green shopping, but I noted in a letter to a newspaper today someone was anal enough to weigh the plastic in their supermarket carrier bags and in the packaging of their supermarket purchases. The carrier bags weighed 8g, the packaging 135g. Hmm.
Dog-poo collectors. Double-edged sword, that, especially if you find the bag you’ve chosen is one of those with little air-holes near the bottom.
Oh Henry, you bring it all back – the paper carrier bag disintegrating in the rain and spilling its contents out over a pedestrian crossing …. You talk about the 60s. Some of us oldies go back to the 40s, so there!
These days I go to Sainsbury’s (because it’s our nearest, and reasonably free of musac except before Christmas) which doesn’t bear much resemblance to the squeaky-clean lavatory-tiled Sainsburys of my youth. I always carry my own stout tote bags, and a few years ago I got a penny discount for each bag. Nowadays I have to stop the checkout folk from giving me a plastic bag for every other item. I could go on (and on) ....
I’m a mere stripling, so much so that I recall one A level physics lesson where I had forgotten my ruler, so was using the edge of my calculator to draw a straight line. The teacher leaned over and observed that in his day, they used to use slide rules.
I’ve got a nice, study hemp bag I use for shopping, so no problems there. It struck me that a cunning plan would be for a conference to give out shopping bag sized conference bags – 90% of the time conference bags are useless for anything except lugging around abstract books, and loosing your lunch tickets in.
On packaging (sorry, I am going on a bit, aren’t I?), my local supermarket (for some reason called KKK) has more packaging around the organic food than the normal food. This just seems wrong.
I think the habit of asking “Do you need a bag?” before selling something small, instead of just putting the thing in a bag and handing it to you is very effective and sounds nice.
And talking about packaging, I cringe every time I buy sanitary towels individually packed, inside a bigger package!