awwww, are we done with plastic bags yet?

Orange bag, originally uploaded by ..george.

Ok, so you thought we were but here I am with another post. :) Considering articles like this one (Phasing out plastic bags: A dissenting voice) we may be on this topic for a long while more.

Actually, during my promotion and discussions of the plastic bag pledge, quite a few issues came out. I haven't blogged about them as yet because I wanted to do a lot more research on them and perhaps find a solution to propose, but then again it think it's beyond me. Am inspired to post today because of two recent forum articles, "Who says burning plastic does no harm?" and "The truth about plastic bags: they are a menace to the environment".

Firstly, a lot a lot of people asked me, "How am I supposed to bag my rubbish tnen?" and even, "Didn't NEA say we needed plastic bags to bag rubbish?". To this I did write a comment on the plastic bag pledge page , basically to say I am thinking the possible "solutions" (some not really outright solutions) to this would be that we may have to change our way of disposal somehow (logistics), we recycle more to reduce the need for plastic bags as rubbish bags (like in Korea for example, see the video) and for our food and perishables, we compost via normal composting or using worms - vermicomposting (which I would admit would not be practical for most flat dwellers). I guess with a few things here and there like swapping, bartering, freecycling, etc. we may reduce our waste to nil, which I have heard at least one person managing to do, though now I've lost the link to that story. And of course, we can consider using biodegradables, although unfortunately, like biofuel these may be made from crops and then we go on to another contraversy.

Another thing brought up was "what's the big deal about filling up the landfill, don't we incinerate?", well, that was brought up too in the forum article I mentioned, Who says burning plastic does no harm? Yep, in the end, we still need landfills. Also, burning releases carbon and burning of some plastics (even incinerated) also releases carcinogens.

And then, how about this hype thing going on? Well, quite a lot of discussion has been done on plastic bags on this blog, see "Are we wasting precious time on plastic bags?" and the debated proposed Australian plastic bag ban

Our new pledge, on eating less meat, has a debate in similar vein - i.e. "what does it help?" Even, "it makes things worse". So much so it boggles the mind. How about the forum article yesterday saying it doesn't solve world hunger? wow, solving world hunger is an ambitious project and I don't think anyone actually claimed that vegetarianism would in fact solve it once and for all, if in the first place everyone did turn to it (personally, I think that's when pigs fly? or perhaps when there are no pigs left in this world, rather). This problem involves, as hinted in the comments of that article, economics, politics, social/behavioral, science, etc...too simplistic to think it solves just by switching.

Then, what is it we're doing? It's just doing what we can, as individuals, in our own capacity.