It should not be a stretch for Powell River’s municipal government to initiate a public education campaign leading to a ban on checkout-counter plastic bags.
Currently, seven Canadian municipalities have bans in place. Last month, Victoria’s city council expressed unanimous support for a six-month period of engagement with grocery stores, advocates and other stakeholders leading up to a vote for a phased-in ban.
The idea of banning plastic bags is no longer considered frontier thinking. The precedent was set by the city of San Francisco and the entire country of Rwanda; both banned plastic bags in 2008. Last November, the state of California banned plastic bag use. Mexico City has been fining stores that hand out plastic bags since 2010 and China has been cutting back since 2008.
Taxing, regulating or charging for plastic bag use is in practice on every continent and the list of cities and countries includes industrial and third-world nations.
Plastic bag use was first introduced in the late 1970s and people resisted using them. By 1985, only 20 per cent of Americans used the bags, so ExxonMobil Chemical campaigned to win over the remaining 80 per cent. Now, more than a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide daily, equal to two million per minute.
Powell River is generating a hugely popular marine/hiking/biking international tourist trade. Full gut/starving mammal syndrome is not limited to our trash-eating, land-based bear population. The same scenario is widely documented in marine populations worldwide.
Whales, dolphins, porpoises, fish, seals, sea lions, otters and amphibians call our waters home. Unknowingly, they ingest micro-particles of plastic daily. At least a 100,000 sea birds die each year because they are unable to digest a plastic bag.
Photos of birds and wildlife trapped in plastic while starving to death should be enough to break hearts and sicken people to the use of plastic bags.
As adults, our job is to model to future generations that we care about the planet they will inherit. Thin plastic bags on spools beside our produce are the worst culprits and could easily be replaced by paper or recyclable bags, or no bags at all.
What about all the other plastic packaging endemic in our stores? It’s wrong too, but the maddening process of invoking change means you just start at the beginning by putting out one fire at a time, until the fire is out.
As consumers, before we head out the door, we simply need to add one more item to our checklist: keys, wallet/purse, reusable bags. Easier still, leave a minimum of five reusable shopping bags in the car at all times. Bags in cars should become like toothbrushes in bathrooms.
Some of us remember forming the habit of buckling our seatbelts and now we do it every time we sit behind the wheel.
So many problems in life are complex. This one is not, and the rewards are so important.
Lesley Armstrong is a resident of Townsite and has a master of education degree in environmental studies.