Have you ever wondered what it looks like around a landfill site after a heavy gale-force storm? In the mid eighties as a young man I was employed by Blue Circle Cement to help clear the land around their Beddingham dump after a particularly severe period of weather. The main culprits were plastic bags. They had blown for miles around. We fished them out of ditches, climbed trees where they’d stuck, and plunged into hawthorn bushes to pull them out. We collected them together in bin bags, and then they were buried in the site. They’ll still be there. Plastic bags, basically, do not decompose. And we use 13 billion a year in this country. That’s a lot of landfill.
Do we need to use them? Well, no, actually. Ireland imposed a tax on plastic bags some years ago, and it was incredible to see how quickly people adapted to bringing their own bags in and using boxes. Our government has looked into a similar scheme, but as yet has passed no legislation. So it’s down to us to self legislate.
It’s worth looking to the little town of Modbury for inspiration in such matters. All 43 of the Devon town’s (population 1,500) retailers unilaterally declared their independence from the plastic bag, after a woman came up with the idea in the pub. And the townspeople, rather than rebelling against the idea, have embraced it. They have stopped using new plastic bags, almost overnight.
Similar moves are afoot in Lewes. It’s good to see that the School Hill clothes shop Gossypium, which has always promoted using sustainable materials, has started up a scheme to try to persuade Lewesians out of the habit of using plastic bags by encouraging shops to offer community organic cotton bags, available at £1.50 each, instead of plastic ones. This is some sort of a start. It would be a very good thing if it led to a sea-change in our relationship with one of the most useful, but environmentally dangerous inventions of our era.