Exactly. Now I’m paying for shopping bags and buying plastic bags for my rubbish, whereas recently they were one in the same. Before the ban, I’d take my backpack down to Coles, do my shopping, fill my backpack with most of my shopping, but take 1 plastic bag for bread and use it for the weeks rubbish. Now I do the same, but have to pay to buy plastic rubbish bags and carry my bread home without the convenience of a bag. Yet the vast majority of environmental destruction comes from countries who still don’t and never will give a toss about environmental destruction. Building a million toilets in Australia won’t stop billion Indians shitting in a river. My wife is Chinese and her mother is over here for a bit. We were at south Melbourne market last weekend, where it’s plastic bag free. I picked up a single head of broccoli, and she tried to put it in one of those little plastic bags, which apparently south melby market is not yet free of. She looked at me like I had a horrible disease when I suggested we didn’t need the bag. “But it’s free” was the apparently unarguable defence. Yep. 20 million of us can change the world versus 3 or 4 billion raised without our advantages. But we should feel ashamed and let them know that our culture is inferior at every turn. Just not when it inconveniences them.
