The great Pacific garbage patch

[Black Orchid]

[Black Orchid]

[Black Orchid]

One single-use plastic bag takes at least 450 years to degrade. Give Miranda Wang three hours and she can reduce ten of them into liquid.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/plastic- ... al-process

Yet we have idiots abusing and accosting checkout operators at Woolies after they decided to ban single use plastic bags. One guy grabbed a checkout girl by the throat. Why? They don't give a damn about the environment? Are they too tight to spend 15 cents on a bag they can re-use?

Woolies bowed to pressure and decided to give away free multiple use bags but why? You don't get free single use bags at Aldi yet people sing their praises.

So what if you forget to take your enviro bags a couple of times and have to spend 15 cents? Soon enough you will remember to take your own bags. Not only that, the Woolies and Coles where I shop have huge storage containers where you can grab some bags if you are caught short and where people can take them in and shove them in the container for others to use.

What is wrong with us?

[Black Orchid]

CONGRATULATIONS Australia! We made international news today.

It wasn’t for a sporting triumph. We haven’t released any impressive economic numbers. No one interesting has died, unless you count Bert Newton during his Logies speech.

No, we’ve made headlines at dozens of news organisations around the world including the BBC, The Sun, The Irish Times and The Straits Timesin Singapore because we’re throwing giant, howling tantrums over the supermarket plastic bag ban which came into effect at Woolworths on June 20 and Coles on July 1.

The reports each gleefully detail the howls of fury from Australia customers everywhere — in stores, on social media, on customer complaints forms — over the fact that plastic bags have now been banned at Woolworths, Coles, IGA and Big W nationwide. It’s even been given a name — bag rage. One man even put his hands around a supermarket worker’s throat, each news outlet breathlessly revealed.

Never mind that South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT — as well as dozens of countries around the world — have banned single-use plastic bags for years and seem to have emerged largely unscathed. The rest of Australia has not had to suffer this indignity before and we simply will not put up with it without clocking a few checkout workers along the way.

>snip<

Others seem to think the entire thing is a devious money-making scheme designed to impoverish us all.

“Anyone has the same thoughts as me?” asked one Twitter user in the manner of your friend’s cousin who totally knows that 9/11 was an inside job because he watched this documentary one time. “Supermarkets are now charging us for … bags! Charging us!!! Don’t you make enough from us!?”

One man on the Coles Facebook page seemed cautiously supportive of the bag ban overall, but still managed to identify a conspiracy.

“Kudos to Coles Forest Lakes for handing out free 15c bags,” he began. “My issue is that single males shopping were being pointedly ignored in being given one of your free Coles bags.

“Good on you,” he finished bitterly, “for perpetuating the divide.”

How’s a man meant to quietly buy his Lean Cuisines when his local supermarket is making such audacious environmental and gender-politicised statements at every turn?

So what does the world think of our bag ban butthurt? Well, over in California — Reuters in the US also ran a story about Australia’s bag rage — Americans are relishing the opportunity to call us idiots as we howl and seethe and shake our fists at the sky like toddlers whose Vegemite toast has been cut into squares instead of triangles.

“Bag rage!?” wrote one incredulous Facebook user. “You’re not serious. Apparently the US doesn’t have the market cornered on entitled douchebags.”

It’s not every day that a nation’s people can be called douchebags by a country that elected Donald Trump. Take a bow, Australia. What a time to be alive.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/envi ... 0d0cbcb6e9

What an embarrassment to the world we are

Maybe Bill Shorten will repeal the plastic bag ban and make the morons happy?

[Neferti]

Canberra has had no "free" plastic bags at the supermarket for years. You do get used to taking along your own "re-usable" bags, or have something in the boot to put the groceries in.

However, what gets me, here, is that you go into K-Mart or Target and various other stores and unless you pay for a bag, you walk out with your purchases in your arms and it makes you feel like you haven't paid for the items. That may have changed since I haven't been near K-Mart or Target for several years.

Plastic bag ban. The ACT banned plastic bags on 1 November 2011. ... The ban applies to all retailers in the ACT for single-use, lightweight polyethylene polymer plastic bags that are less than 35 microns in thickness (these are the thin plastic bags with handles that were typically supplied at supermarkets check-outs).

I still buy "bin liners", not sure of the price but you get a roll of 30 for about 2 bucks. Not everybody wants a "garbage bin" in their kitchen (or bathroom). I have 2 "bags" hanging on cupboard doorknobs in the Kitchen, one for garbage, the other for recycling. They get removed to the proper bins, daily.

Oh, and I do not think this has anything, whatsoever, to do with saving dolphins, fish, the Great Barrier Reef or Global Warming. Most "recycled" stuff still goes to the tip. I got a diatribe from the Local Yokels the other day telling me what I can put in the recycling bin ... if you happen to leave the screw tops on your wine bottle/s they go to "land-fUll" (that's not a typo). Make sure that any paper and/or cardboard has anything "plastic" removed and do wash everything ... the sorters don't like getting their hands dirty! So much for chucking the glass, cardboard and plastic into the "recycling" bin. Avoid the hassle and send ALL to the tip ... otherwise known as the Land FULL.