Oahu’s Plastic Bag Battle: My Personal Experience with Alternatives to Plastic
One of the ugly truths about plastic bags.
True confessions up front: Yes, I am a registered Green Party voter. No, I won’t use poisons to eliminate cockroaches, mosquitoes, and other insect life. OK, I may be kind of out there on the environmental preservation spectrum. But that’s me.
I know half of Oahu is in an uproar about today being the first day of the plastic bag ban. I have personal friends who refuse to carry canvas bags. I have used plastic shopping bags as garbage bags, because I refuse to purchase plastic.
Nevertheless, there are valuable alternatives to plastic that could actually improve our economy. While my partner was dying of progressive MS, we needed lots of general disposal bags in addition to the biohazard boxes for his syringes, etc. Through a local food co-op I was able to source a company that manufactures grocery bags using cornstarch instead of plastic. Believe it or not, using plant starches and vegetable oils, it is possible to create a quite satisfactory shopping bag, as strong and convenient as plastic. (Anyone up for funding a taro starch and coconut oil experiment?)
The amazing advantage is that these bags break down into biodegradable, compostable particles in a matter of months, as opposed to trashing country roads, floating away in the ocean and killing whales and turtles, and adding to that very frightening garbage spiral in the Pacific, which is growing bigger every day. In fact, the bags I had stored on our lanai broke down in their boxes after a year of sunny days and cool evenings, because I had purchased too many, anticipating a much longer life for my partner.
Even paper bags can be produced from 100% post-consumer paper waste, another biologically and environmentally attractive alternative.
We don’t even have to carry calabashes on our heads, so I think we’re lucky!
If we are consuming so many “things” to the extent that the transport of these “things” is sufficient to create conflict, then maybe we could examine our consumption habits? Any self-sustaining consumption model could be patterned after a biological cycle, where the output (waste) of the end of the cycle becomes the input (raw materials) of the beginning of the cycle. The problem with our current consumer patterns is that they are convenient (and profitable) only for the very wealthy top percentage of the Earth’s population, with a massive load of toxic trash jamming up the end of the line, creating destruction and misery for all. (The “Constipation Model?”)
Consider today the beginning of something better and more sustainable. Your children’s children’s children will thank you.
