Don’t Be So Plastic! Longer-Term Thinking in Sustainability
Long-term thinking…..one great example of something we didn’t think about over the big picture is plastic bags. Yup, it’s something that today many can’t think to live without! While they do have some pros, mostly the cons outweigh the good.
When I was growing up, paper bags were the only way you could carry purchases from a store; plastic bags were virtually nonexistent. The companies that started selling plastic bags launched a campaign that worked well by pointing out the problems with using paper bags, including deforestation and durability. Durability was a no-brainer. A plastic bag is stronger than paper in terms of the mass that can be placed into it before tearing. True, paper can as well, but paper must be thick to support an equal amount of mass. Plastic was supposedly able to be recycled or reused…but to be honest, how often do most reuse a plastic bag to get the full usability out of it?
As far as recycling, we all can see how that went.
- Apparently, Plastic Bags Were Invented To Save The Planet, But Then We Got Lazy (from Bored Panda)
- From birth to ban: A history of the plastic shopping bag (from Unenvironment)
- Battle of the Grocery Bags: Plastic Versus Paper (from NYTimes)
- In the 90s, we were taught to use plastic instead of paper to save the rainforest from deforestation. Now we’re taught to use paper instead of plastic to save the ocean from pollution Why? (from Quora)
My point on honesty and the change for the better goes to the deforestation portion of the campaign. During that time, dwindling forests and natural habitat was a major concern talked about by everyone. Plastic made sense in the easy and short term to save trees by using plastic instead of paper, use a plastic bag and save a tree. However, the real problem was twofold:
- One, paper companies were not investing in their futures by planting trees where they removed them to keep a healthy population of forests going. The thought was since the forests were so vast there isn’t a real reason to plant new trees. Simply put, cost to do that bit into the bottom line.
- Second, recycling and recycled paper wasn’t utilized or widespread like it is today. Both solutions today would be considered sustainable living and sustainable practices and praised and even bragged about… and this is a reason why people are changing back to paper bags.
While I am not advocating for either (I personally use cloth reusable bags as often as possible), in our lives, some solutions do not consider the human factors of laziness and greed. On paper (pun intended), some solutions work better than others… and when the people variable is involved, the “better” solution sometimes falls apart in implementation. Personally, the scuba diver in me screams loudly when I see plastic bags in use, because I have seen first hand where they end up.
But I digress…
Today’s topic isn’t about the GEW (Gross Environmental Weight) of one over the other. Everything has a GEW, and one could make the argument that on the surface, plastic does have a lower GEW than paper. Today, it is about us as a society. If we are to be better today than yesterday, we must embrace change and not be afraid to change. The adage, “It worked for me when I was growing up…” is failed logic. In the bigger picture, if we stick to that, we would never progress, and we’d still be living in the Stone Age. Also, “It works for that country, but it won’t work in mine…” Well, if it works someplace else, why then wouldn’t it work where you are? Just because it is different doesn’t make it bad.
When considering sustainable solutions, let’s work out the long term as well as the short term and make the changes in life quickly but with intelligence. The most important and best solution is not as individuals, but as a society. Just think of the short time that society switched from paper bags to plastic. In the United States, that change occurred over a span of less than 20 years. Now, I hope that we can change to something that is in the long term better for everyone and the planet in less time to help make a difference and clean up our home. By and large, the reason we “switched” was because companies decided for us to change and we went along with it. We must do better and think for ourselves… and tell companies what we want and not the other way around. This is the economic basic of supply and demand! Sitting around waiting for someone to do it first is societal conditioning we’ve come to because we’re constantly barraged with corporate marketing that tries to dictate what is and is not good for us… most often with the ulterior motive of beefing up the company’s/industry’s bottom line.
Be open minded. Money is a short-sighted reason for not changing our habits; often, once the dollars and cents are worked out over the bigger picture, it actually does work out in our favor. But that’s a blog for another day…
1 thought on “Don’t Be So Plastic! Longer-Term Thinking in Sustainability”