I was in the United States last year, in Connecticut for a friend’s wedding. And one of my mates asked to stop off at a local drug store to pickup some chewing gum and a Gatorade. It was the first time I’d been in a CVS store for maybe 18 months, but you know, those expansive American drug stores are all pretty much the same. They sell junk food and greeting cards and every uncture, potion, and tinted moisturiser under the sun.

It was about the same time in New Zealand the supermarkets were finally getting rid of single use plastic bags. I remember walking through the CVS candy aisle and admiring the bags of sweets being pumped out and pushed upon the masses. There were sacks of these things with hundreds of lollies, all of them individually wrapped in plastic. I paused, looked around at the sprawling aisles, and haphazardly tried a few sums. In that store alone, that one store, a bog standard drug store in the middle of Connecticut, there might have been, I don’t know, 20,000 individual pieces of plastic wrapping. Maybe more! More five times that number. But conservatively, I thought 20,000 pieces of plastic wrapping felt a good guess. There you have it, I thought. We are stuffed.

I’ve found the transition into a plastic bag free life relatively painless. Monday meant nothing to me because I’ve been plastic bag free for a year or two now. I used to use plastic bags as bin liners, now I just buy compostable ones that feel as though they’re already beginning to erode by the time I peel a full bag from the inside of my bin. But apart from that, what has this grand transition meant? Nothing really, I just keep a couple of reusable bags in the boot of my car and a couple in my apartment and Bob’s your uncle. 

I do think that as consumers we have a responsibility to be more considered and thoughtful in the way we purchase and consume stuff. But I also reckon this plastic bag ban is misleading. It risks making us feel disproportionately good about our behaviour, when in the scheme of things, it’s going to make next to no difference in saving the planet. Don’t get me wrong, I support not having so called single use plastic bags. I hope it helps to collectively enlighten us and proves to be the spark many of us need in careful considering the rest of our plastic usage. But by itself… it’s nothing. You only need travel to a developing country or indeed walk through a drug store in the U.S to know that whatever plastic we’re cutting here at the Countdown or Fresh Choice checkout is being used and tossed a zillion times over in other parts of the World. 

I also think it shifts the burden of responsibility. Psychologically we’re simple beasts, all it takes are some bright colours, an All Black, and a modest marketing budget and we humans will buy anything. But it’s the producers of plastic that in my eyes hold more of the responsibility in reducing our collective damage.

Just walk through the supermarket. Walk through a department store. Everything comes in plastic packaging. Everything. We’ve been brainwashed into accepting ludicrous quantities of plastic as the norm. As cleaner, as more convenient. Do we need regulation to stop producers from unnecessarily wrapping everything? To prevent them from tapping into our collective psychological weakness? To end the shifting of the burden from producer to consumer? If we really want to improve the World, yeah, we probably do.

But I for one am not gonna pat myself on the back for remembering my reusable bags when my cucumber comes wrapped tip to toe in plastic.