Starting today shoppers will no longer be provided with free single-use plastic bags in Woolworths stores across Australia. Rival supermarket giant Coles has also vowed to implement a plastic bag ban amidst oncoming state regulations and pressure from consumers.
A lot of those consumers that want an official national ban are people like me. We want to do the right thing by the environment, but cop out and use plastic bags all too often.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need the government and retail companies to physically take plastic bags away from us. In an ideal world, we would simply take it upon ourselves to stop using them. But the truth is, most of us aren’t willing to voluntarily suffer the small inconvenience for the greater cause.
Which is why sometimes, on these particular occasions, a nanny-state style of government intervention is a very good thing. If we don’t care enough about the environment to make active, diligent changes to our everyday lives, then we need that choice taken away.
At this point, it’s impossible to claim ignorance of the extreme damage that our global plastic consumption has on the environment. It’s been drilled in for years that plastic pollution is killing our ecosystems.
We’ve heard David Attenborough beg us to quit plastic and seen the powerful images broadcast across the internet. We know that using plastic bags is killing the environment.
But in that moment when you’re bringing home the shopping, grabbing take-away or picking up a few things from the store, the reality of the environmental damage can feel far away and too easily overridden by the immediacy of needing to transport your items from A to B.
It’s a very human thing and doesn’t make you a terrible person, but it does make intervention necessary.
So far South Australia, ACT, the Northern Territory and Tasmania have already implemented statewide plastic bag bans. Queensland kicks off their ban next month and Victoria has promised to follow suit with no timeline set in place. NSW has, embarrassingly, remained silent with no plans announced to ban the plastic bag.
To be blunt, we need to change a lot about our lifestyles to save the environment from complete human destruction, and based on our inability to enforce those changes ourselves, we need the government to step in and make us change.
So here’s to more initiatives like the plastic bag ban.