Your Significance

I’ve been talking to people about plastic pollution. The conversation always ends up in the same place.

“We don’t have a choice” people tell me. “The fridge you buy, the car you buy, the camera, the cellphone – all of these are designed with planned obsolescence in mind. Eventually it costs you more to maintain than to buy new. Often repair is simply not an option.”

Or, “Everything in the supermarket is packaged in plastic. There simply is no choice.”

For anyone who has looked seriously at this issue, it quickly becomes clear that making the change to zero impact is an extremely inconvenient and difficult undertaking.

Aside from the fact that *ahem* not having a planet to live on is shortly going to become a much more serious inconvenience than seeking out sustainable products, the great tragedy in this sort of thinking is that people tend to go to that “all or nothing” place. Feeling helpless in the face of the various barriers to entry, they choose to do nothing, believing that any change they make will be insignificant.

This is simply not true.

There are various sources of plastic pollution. They are all things that you as a consumer can directly affect. However, affecting them will take varying degrees of effort on your part. For instance, getting your supermarket to stop offering you cooking oil packaged in plastic is a project that will take months or years of petitions, lobbying and protests. Taking a cloth bag along to pack your groceries in is entirely within your reach.

But how much difference will you actually make?


Consider Chris Jordan’s depiction of the number of plastic bags used in the US every five seconds.

The image above is a zoom in from the original here showing 60,000 plastic bags, which is how many bags are used in the U.S. every 5 seconds!

Just in case you didn’t get that… EVERY FIVE SECONDS.

Imagine if everyone in the US stopped using plastic grocery bags. Nothing else, just that. Yes, the difference would be significant.

We love to point fingers at the Yanks for being such bad litterbugs. But if you stand outside Pick ‘n Pay for half an hour and watch the number of plastic bags walking out, you start getting that nasty creeping feeling that our contribution per capita is not far behind.

Let’s run some of our own numbers. Conservatively let’s assume that you fill three shopping bags every time you go shopping – it’s at least that many a week, right? That equates to 156 bags a year.

You might be thinking, “Meh – that’s not so bad”

And yeah… 156 bags a year makes you a bit disgusting, but it certainly isn’t an ecological disaster.

It does however, become a problem when you consider that there are 49 million South Africans all taking home a minimum of 3 shopping bags a week.

That’s seven billion six hundred forty-four million bags every year. Twenty million bags. Every day.

Now imagine if everyone in South Africa stopped paying their thirty cent guilt tax for plastic grocery bags and got into the habit of taking their own bags along to the supermarket. Nothing else, just that.

Yes, the difference would be significant.