Like many a concerned consumer I have been dutifully recycling my plastic bags at the supermarket, or rather re-using them every time I go back there, to reduce my environmental impact. However, at the same, the assistants there are always encouraging me to take more. Now with all this discussion going on as to whether supermarkets should ban the free plastic bag entirely or whether we are being responsible to keep taking them, I have come up with a solution.

Don't Recycle?

It is simply this. Every time you go to the supermarket and they offer you free plastic bags, take as many as they will let you. Don’t recycle them and don’t throw them away, just keep them.

That way the turtles and sea birds are safe from accidentally eating them and you are getting what is rightly yours. The thing is, if you think about it, they are after all your bags. It's all part of the yield, part of what you are paying for when you go to the supermarket, so you may as well take them. But then it is up to you to find useful ways to use them, not to waste them.

In my life I am both a student and teacher of permaculture, which is a kind of applied environmental design method. One thing that it teaches us to value the whole yield and that nothing is in fact waste. In a natural system, like a jungle or forest there is of course no waste, no build up of unused things and no build up of pollution - everything is reused again and nothing in nature says no to a free lunch.

Value Everything

So if we want to really think green we have to learn to value everything and find a useful way to use it. As a customer of the supermarket you are paying for those bags and so long as they are giving them away for free, then they are yours so you may as well take them. With the cost of oil going up almost daily the more we as customers do this the more the supermarkets will be force to reconsider their policy. When they do eventually start charging for them, as indeed seems inevitable now, then you will be ready and will have a handy cupboard full of the things to keep you going well into the future.

So I keep my nice strong, reusable big shopping bag handy but whereever I see them giving those bag away I make sure I get my fair share. If I do have too many then I give them to the second had charity shop in town to use. I see this as a way of actively challenging unsustainable and wasteful activities, whilst maximising my own personal benefit, surely this is the key to thinking green?

Happy shopping!

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