Everyone seems to be very pleased with the new rules on plastic bags, which require supermarkets to charge you for them. Enthusiasts boast that the number of plastic bags dished out in Hong Kong shops has dropped considerably. A success for the environment lobby?
Not so fast. The number of bags has dropped but the nature of the bags has changed. In the old days a supermarket plastic bag was a whispy little thing. Our week’s shopping often filled 12 of them. If you put too much in they broke. Awkward shaped items made holes. They were certified to be environmentally friendly and bio-degradable. Often they were degrading visibly before you got out of the shop.
Now that supermarkets are forced to charge by the bag, the standard bag has changed. Supermarkets wish, after all, to give you value for money. So nowadays a supermarket bag is the size of a small parachute, and is constructed from some close relative of the stuff they use to make flak jackets. Archaeologists of the year 40,000 will puzzle over the layer of durable deposits which appeared in Hong Kong sometime just after the beginning of the 21st century. Because these bags are going to be here for ever. It is certainly true that we use fewer bags. When I forget to take the old ones, as often happens, our weekly shop now fits into three or four of the new Dreadnought class supermarket bag. But is the planet better off, one wonders. Or did our leaders fall for a trendy catchphrase just when the invention of biodegradable plastics had made it obsolete?
tim's experiment 
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