Bring back plastic shopping bags. No one’s buying the ban | Peter Goers

There’s a new black market boom coming via our nation’s frustrated shoppers, writes Peter Goers. Have your say.

My heart, mind and the load of life sags, for the want of plastic bags.

For nearly two months plastic shopping bags have been banned in SA.

Bring them back! Perhaps there’ll be a black market in good old, noble, vastly useful plastic shopping bags.

Perhaps I’ll stand on street corners saying, “Psst… do you want to buy a plastic bag?”

They’ ve been replaced by brown paper bags and weird latex or quasi-latex bags.

The new supermarket fruit and veg bags are pathetic and ghastly (which sounds like the Liberal Party in SA - pathetic and ghastly.)

When you go to the supermarket you see frustrated shoppers wetting their fingers trying - often in vain - to open up those bloody bags. They are just awful - the bags not the customers.

Meanwhile you get paper bags in smaller shops.

TELL US MORE IN THE COMMENTS

They are nowhere near as strong or tensile, less inclined to be reused and they rip, tear and break easily.

Remember those ubiquitous, strong grey plastic bags we used to get for free in supermarkets. They were banned in 2009 and we’ve missed them ever since.

We all had to be retrained to remember to take our green shopping bags into the supermarket which we generally forgot and had to leave a full trolley by the checkout and run back to the car to get them.

We were told that those lovely grey plastic bags were environmentally suspect and indeed killed four turtles in Townsville.

Australians used 4.8bn of those bags per year although they accounted for a mere 0.6 per cent of total rubbish and they actually stabilised landfill. They broke down in six months.

The green plastic supermarket bags - they are polypropylene (great name for a drag queen) take a thousand years to break down.

We recycle those green bags endlessly and pity poor supermarket chooks, chicks and cobbers who have to fill foul, dirty, cockroach infested green bags.

Those green bags seem to breed in the boot of your car. I think I have 374 of them in my boot and we all have so many of them they are part of divorce settlements and estate planning.

Supermarket shopping bags used to be free and now we have to pay them - endlessly. Now we have those harder, crinkly plastic supermarket bags and I probably have 146 in my boot.

Brown paper bags are not better for the environment.

Trees are killed to make them.

Yes, the bags are recycled but does our painstaking recycling actually work.

How much of it ends up, untreated, in third world countries? Our first world problem becomes a third world problem.

People in other countries assiduously recycle plastic bags until they become frayed. Be frayed. Be very frayed.

A shopper stands at the entrance to a Coles supermarket. Picture: Ian Waldie/Bloomberg via Getty Images

So plastic bags are banned but we still have garbags. I’m so Glad (OK) about that.

Nothing is done to stop the bigger problem of gazillions of plastic water bottles polluting our planet.

They should be banned. The greatest con of our age (apart from Trump) is the fact that in countries with perfectly good potable water, people must guzzle bottled water which is more expensive than petrol.

Designer water is killing us slowly.

Plastic packaging has become extreme. All of us have been injured by scissors and knives trying to prise open plastic packaging.

The great irony of the prohibition of plastic bags is that plastic is now being brilliantly recycled into clothing and other useful things.

So I bags plastic bags with a strange desire but I’ll get over it.

SA newsreader Mike Smithson.

Mike Smithson celebrates 45 years on television. Picture: Instagram @7newsadelaide/@mikesmithson7

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