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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge mass of rubbish floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and it’s getting so big that it may soon become an actual country.
It could have its own flag: one of those blue plastic collection bags from Kidney Health Australia – it would flutter beautifully in the gentle Pacific toxic breeze. It could have its own anthem: A Trillion Green Bottles would be perfect (and like all anthems, you only need to sing the first verse, which is a relief). It could even have its own unique people: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Folk, who walk around in milk-carton shoes and wear chip-packet hats and live in tiny styrofoam-block houses. Sounds kind of cute, actually. Maybe this is not as bad as we all think.
Of course I’m not in support of a Great Pacific Garbage Patch Nation.
But of course I’m not in support of a Great Pacific Garbage Patch Nation, as adorable as the place sounds. No, like most people I want to clean up this planet so that humankind can live in health and happiness for generations to come. And I am unwavering in my staunch eco-activism. Utterly unwavering. Except when it comes to plastic kitchen tidy bags. Then my enthusiasm dissipates slightly, like sewer pollutants dribbling into a pristine waterway.
Plastic kitchen tidy bags have been an important part of kitchens for a long time. That’s where we throw all the stuff we’re not sure how to get rid of – the food scraps we can’t compost, the soft plastics we can’t recycle, the rubbishy goop we can’t force down the sink drain, not even if we mash it up with a chopstick.
But it’s getting harder and harder to use those bags – Supermarkets have stopped giving them away free, governments are talking about banning them altogether. So where are we supposed to chuck all our unrecyclable, uncompostable un-chopstick-mashable waste? My eco-conscious neighbour next door suggested I forget about bags altogether – just dump the waste straight into my unlined kitchen bin, then wash out the bin every week with a garden hose. So I tried that. And my even more eco-conscious neighbour living on the other side glared at me for wasting water.