Are you environmentally conscientious? Have you dutifully purchased your “bags for life,” those reusable shopping bags that make disposable bags unnecessary and thereby minimize your carbon footprint?
Does that make you feel good about yourself? Well, maybe it shouldn’t.
Before 2019 was over, the top 10 grocery stores in Britain reported selling 1.5 billion “bags for life” since the year began, an average of 54 per household in the UK. Presumably, a typical family could get by easily with less than half-a-dozen bags and, by doing so, dramatically reduce the amount of plastic that eventually ends up in landfills.
But it doesn’t seem to be working that way. Supermarkets in Britain distributed nearly 20,000 more tons of plastic in 2018 than they did the year before. The intended solution is merely compounding the problem.
To make matters worse, much of our home recycling practices are more placebo than cure. Families that fail to sort their trash properly end up contaminating genuine recyclables, jacking up labor and machinery repair costs. For years, much of our recycling was shipped to China for disposal. And even under ideal conditions, the cost of recycling has often made it financially impractical.
Grapple with the Gray
List two or three reasons why we should continue recycling even if it’s ineffective.
List two or three reasons why we would be better off to stop ineffective recycling.
Is there another alternative?
Having weighed the options, how would you suggest addressing the global waste crisis?
Gray Matters
Our brains are lazy.
That’s why we repeat the same behaviors over and over, even when we know they aren’t productive, and even when we know they’re counterproductive. We take comfort in familiarity, which makes us feel better by convincing us that we have the business of life well in hand.
Is that a bad thing? Sometimes, yes; sometimes, no.
Medically speaking, there are conditions where our bodies have the natural ability to fight off disease. In such cases, a placebo may boost the body’s defense or healing system by promoting the confidence that comes from taking positive action.
In other cases, however, the placebo offers nothing but an illusion of intervention that may convince us that we’ve done enough so that we ignore the essential treatment we need to save us.
So which is it here?
Does the illusion of environmental responsibility encourage complacency, so that we exempt ourselves from implementing practices that might address our problems in a meaningful way? Or does our commitment to environmentally friendly policies keep us sensitive to the urgency of the problem, thereby increasing the likelihood that we will support beneficial policies and take more responsibility for our own actions? Will an otherwise ineffective public awareness campaign help change consumer behavior and so help progressive policies eventually succeed?
That’s a question for the experts and researchers. If, over time, the sale of both “bags for life” and disposable shopping bags decline, then short-term failure may produce long-term success. How long do we have to wait? That is also a question for the experts, since human behavior often changes very slowly.
Can consumers be educated to shift their buying and disposal habits? Will recycling technology improve to become more agile and efficient?
Opinions have integrity only when they rest on a foundation of facts. Predictions have integrity only when they are based on objectively collected and evaluated data, which requires a willingness to examine both sides of an issue honestly, to encourage debate among representatives of differing perspectives, and to make mid-course corrections as new evidence shows support for one side or the other.
In the meantime, we need to continue investigating different options rather than putting all our eggs in one bag.