Plastic shopping bags
On Wednesday, July 1, 2020 all retail outlets throughout Japan began charging customers for the use of plastic bags. Single-use, reusable plastic bags were not outlawed. They are still produced and used. But the new requirement is an attempt by the government here to reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in the country’s rivers, forests, streams and, ultimately, surrounding oceans by attaching a direct monetary cost to the villain, plastic shopping bags that is supposed to act as a deterrent. Maybe it will.
I didn’t know about it until that morning when I went to the local convenience store. I suppose Japanese have known for a long time that the law was coming, which shows how out of the loop a language deficiency can make one. As it turns out, domestic and international pressure to reduce plastic bag use in Japan had been growing for several years. Political pressure was applied during the Group of 20 Osaka summit in 2019, and the government announced a plan to start charging for plastic bags starting on April 1st. That starting date was late moved to July 1st.
As of Wednesday, July 1, 2020, anyone who shops at convenience stores, supermarkets, department stores or shops where single-use plastic bags were previously distributed free of charge will now have to pay for such bags. A large number of stores prepared for the new rule by handing out complimentary reusable shopping bags in advance to encourage shoppers to use them, and many stores introduced a plastic bag charge over the last few months.
It’s considered an important and overdue measure in the campaign to reduce the amount of single-use plastics, which is a major waste problem, but it’s hardly a solution. Many people also use shopping bas as garbage bags. Plastic shopping bags are generally strong, flexible and can be tied up easily. If shopping bags are not available, people may buy more plastic garbage bags, which means the amount of plastic reduced by restricting shopping bags could be made up by the amount of plastic in garbage bags. Or, people may just opt to pay for plastic shopping bags that used to be free.
It might be said that the government (the Trade Ministry) knows the new law is unlikely to reduced plastic waste and doesn’t’ claim that it will. If that were the actual goal, it would just ban plastic shopping bags. The Trade Ministry confesses that the aim of the law is to make consumers acknowledge the plastic waste issue - forcing people to assess whether they really need plastic shopping bags in the first place.
The move against plastic is more a business decision than an environmental decision. But that does not prevent it from being framed as an environmental issue.
The environmental movement is anti-Nature.
It's sad that the environmental crusade against plastics aims to retard planet Earth's 4.5 billion year quest to get what it has long wanted - plastic. The environmental movement is anti-Nature. It might be said that the human species evolved for exactly this reason - to make plastic for the Earth, to be the Earth's plastics vector. Other species were selected and thrived for a time, but their failure meant that Nature selected them for extinction until, finally, homo sapiens emerged as the species best suited to this plastic endeavor. I can guarantee that Earth doesn't care at all about plastics. And I can guarantee that the Earth is not at all harmed by plastic bags, plastic cups or straws - or carbon dioxide, or pesticides, or warming ambient temperatures, or deforestation, or species loss, or melting glaciers, or shrinking ice caps, or even nuclear waste. Nuclear waste does not harm the planet! The planet doesn’t have a problem. It’s human beings who have a problem. It’s human beings who are screwed. We are harming ourselves and the environments that sustain us. The Earth is just fine, and Nature doesn’t care about us - only that we supply the Earth with plastic.
The lack of humility is disenchanting, and the pretention is unbecoming.
Planet Earth has been bombarded by asteroids, boiled in lava, frozen under ice; mountains have risen and eroded away, and most animal life that has ever lived has passed into extinction, and yet it’s still here. And people think that after all this some plastic is going to destroy the planet? The anthropocentric arrogance of it is nauseating. Sometimes it appears that environmentalists don't care at all about Nature - I mean, not in the abstract. What they care about is a having a nice place for themselves to live in and occupy - in other words, even more self-centered, anthropocentric arrogance. The lack of humility is disenchanting, and the pretention is unbecoming. That does not mean that this pollution-retarding measure is wrong, only that our fairy tale about it is a gross affectation.
Nuclear waste does not harm the planet.
I remember when I was a child the virtues of reusable plastic were hailed as the savior of endangered forests and protector of the natural environment, just as the virtues of the automobile were once eulogized as the savior of our cities from the filth and health hazard of equine manure and human offal. What was old is new again. Right now, plastic is the enemy, but in the future, it might fit differently into our evolving ethos. I don't want people to think that we, today, are the epitome of environmental awareness and ethical rectitude. Despite our plastic clean-up efforts, our descendants will curse us for the backward beasts we really are just as we now curse those who came before us and delivered us to our current predicament. Even malicious people sincerely believe they are operating with the best motives, so this plastic obsession impresses me less than it seems to impress others.
But I could be wrong.