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  Today Online 28 Apr 07
No plastic, fantastic Save the world – and your kitchen drawer

There is one drawer in our kitchen that attacks me. All of the other drawers and cupboards are benign, but this particular drawer has got it in for me. As soon as I wrench the packed drawer open, hundreds of plastic bags suddenly burst free.

My wife has often found me rolling around the kitchen floor, wrestling unsuccessfully to remove a dozen plastic bags from my neck.

It's all her fault, of course. She doesn't cram the kitchen cupboards. Nor does she overstock the bathroom with toilet rolls.

But when it comes to shopping bags, she stuffs that one drawer with a mountain of plastic which explodes like a jack in the box every time I open it. For recycling purposes, she keeps medium-sized shopping bags, oversized clothes bags, those tiny bags from the pharmacy and — my own particular favourite — bags for holding other bloody bags.

"Can we put some of these in the recycling dustbin?" I ask, while removing a bag from my windpipe.

"Do we really need to keep this bag? It reeks of old cucumbers." "No, I've got to keep that bag," she'll reply. "It's really good for keeping all my bags in."

Don't be surprised by this. My wife recently bought half-a-dozen containers for the kitchen because she needed somewhere to store half a dozen smaller containers.

But it was even worse in Singapore. And some of the blame must be apportioned to the staff on the checkout tills.

In Singapore supermarkets, staff appeared to be working on some bizarre commission scheme: The more plastic bags they gave away, the more they got paid. I once bought three items in a Toa Payoh supermarket and they were handed to me in three separate bags.

Then, there's the double-bagging. Staff kindly double-bagged bulky items such as cases of soft drink or boxes of washing powder, but they occasionally double-bagged on auto-pilot.

"Hey, no need to put two bags on that, ah?" I'd say at my favourite Toa Payoh supermarket. "You sure, ah?" "Yeah, I think I can manage. It's a bar of soap."

In Australia, the policy is at the opposite end of spectrum. To their credit, Australian supermarkets (and many of their shoppers) are generally clued in to the major environmental concerns. Rising temperatures and the worst drought in recorded history can do that to a country.

For less than a dollar, shoppers are encouraged to buy green, polypropylene bags which can be reused on every subsequent shopping trip and that's what we do.

On the few occasions when I've forgotten, however, I've been treated with a contempt usually reserved for football hooligans.

"Oh, can I get a bag for this, please," I asked an auntie on the checkout recently. She shot me a look that suggested I'd enquired if I might sleep with her daughter. "Are you sure you want a bag?" She replied, making no effort to conceal her disgust. "Well, I could juggle the two cases of diet coke I suppose." Clearly, she wasn't a fan of extra shopping bags. She wasn't a fan of sarcasm either.

To avoid embarrassment, I've actually staggered out of my local supermarket with a dozen bulky items crammed in various nooks and crannies instead of asking for a plastic bag. And it's not a pleasant experience holding cucumbers in your nooks and crannies.

But at the domestic level, most Australians are environmentally aware. Even their dustbins are separated — one for waste, the other recycling. That might not be logistically possible for Singapore now (although there's no architectural reason why future housing blocks cannot be designed with two chutes — one for waste, one for recyclable materials), but the country has taken a great leap forward with the Bring Your Own Bag Day (BYOBD — I put this absurd abbreviation in as a joke. I promise not to use it again).

The wonderful campaign will be held on the first Wednesday of every month and I'm happy to plug it again here. The next is on May 2.

Singaporeans use about 2.5 billion plastic bags a year. That's an unacceptable figure for a country with no natural resources. It is second nature now for many Australians to take their own bags on shopping trips and recycle just about everything that can be recycled within their homes.

Hopefully, the Singapore bag campaign is a step in that direction. We need to save the planet and, more importantly, save our kitchen drawers. If one more plastic bag leaps out at me, I'm sticking my wife in the drawer.
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