Its not just about plastic bags, but a new way of life

Last week’s column about the waste that comes with wrapping a piece of French bread three times that made a reader, Renante Pilapil <reyphilo@yahoo. com, concerned enough to write.

The letter-writer says almost all of our department stores give away a lot of free plastic bags when you buy goods from the grocery section. Has anyone ever thought of asking them if they were not worried that these plastic bags are sources of nonbiodegradable environmental waste, which when burned contribute to global warming?

Why won’t our grocery stores start using paper bags instead? Or what if they make the customers pay for the plastic bags so that the latter would be discouraged to use plenty of them? Or why won’t shoppers use old plastic bags when they do grocery? He adds that in the Netherlands grocery stores do not give away free plastic bags, instead shoppers buy them. This is also the same practice of some grocery stores in Belgium. That way shoppers are discouraged from buying plastic bags every time they shop. Instead, they bring with them their old plastic bags and re-use them.

When I lived in London my groceries were loaded into old boxes from Safeway’s depot. This is a worthwhile practice especially for those who have cars. Once I did see some old cartons in Makro and Shopwise but this did not last.

It just shows you that it is not grocery owners alone who can make a difference in this mammoth undertaking to save our planet. Ditto goes for the public. I suspect that is one of the reasons why Makro or Shopwise stopped using old cartons. There was no reaction from the public for their good act. If you ask me, there is as much an obligation from shoppers to demand from grocery owners that this is a worthwhile partnership to think of the best way we can help in the worldwide effort against global warming. Stopping the use of plastic bags is but a small start but we must start.

We Filipinos will have to think big to help in what is a global problem after all. After the massive UN report on climate change, which was done by some 3,700 scientists around the world — the jury is out: — we are all guilty, we made the mess. Finger pointing will not help and neither will a who-cares attitude let others clean up the mess. If there are still skeptics about global warming, here’s the score. The science behind climate change looks ever stronger, and mankind is almost certainly to blame for resetting the global thermostat. That’s the key conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which published the summary of its latest report with a warning that world average temperatures could climb several degrees by the end of the century. And its findings will be tough to challenge. The panel is backed by the United Nations.

In the English town of Harrogate, they are protesting the building of another superstore citing other factors like extra cars and hazards to schoolchildren. Gone will be the quiet life and the pristine environment. One campaigner against it decried "We calculate there will be nearly three million extra car journeys a year if this goes ahead. That’s the issue — not world domination (sometimes used by leftists). The grocery giants are not being insensitive and have announced measures to help like weighing carbon costs and emission labels. We may see our way of life changing as multinationals cross borderlines for a ‘green consumption revolution’.

Supermarket chain Tesco pledged to revolutionize its business to become "a leader in helping to create a low-carbon economy" with a raft of new measures to help combat climate change.

Tesco, UK’s biggest retailer, which produces 2M tons of carbon a year in the UK, said it would put new labels on every one of the 70,000 products it sells so that shoppers can compare carbon costs in the same way they can compare salt content and calorie counts.

Last year Tesco unveiled a 10-point plan designed to make it a "good neighbor" which included promises to install wind turbines and solar panels, source more food locally and encourage healthier eating. It has also started offering loyalty card points to shoppers who do not take carrier bags.

Other retailers, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer have followed suit and with an environmental plan to become carbon neutral and send no waste to landfill by 2012. The government has also waded into the issue. Last year the environment secretary, David Miliband, told the bosses of the big four supermarkets to set and meet targets to cut carbon emissions, to use their buying power to demand greener products and to label electrical goods more clearly so that shoppers could more easily buy the most efficient products. Our retailers can do the same, but it has to come from us, for the sake of the world in which our children will live.

I don’t know if that was done on purpose but there it was — a picture of former Senator and vice-presidential aspirant Loren Legarda’s picture juxtaposed with a picture of her former husband (?) or live-mate, former Batangas Governor Leviste being led to prison in the front page. Oh, the fates of men and women. It does move mysteriously. Who would have known? In the last elections, the talk was Leviste would be a liability to Loren (is that why she dropped his name). But Loren seemed to have weathered that. Neither did she lose sleep when she became a topic of unflattering gossip about a ‘secret liaison’ with another politician.

Sex and politics is not exclusive to the Philippines. In the US, it is said that the biggest threat to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions is former President Clinton’s adventures, now said to be centered on Canada’s Belinda Stronach. She is single, youngish, attractive, wealthy, impeccably well-connected and politically ambitious — glamorous in every respect, a report said. And what do you know, she is also a politician. She supported abortion rights, gun control and same-sex marriages when she ran for leadership of the Conservatives but lost to right-winger Stephen Harper.

Two years ago, Time magazine listed her as one of the 100 most powerful people on the planet. They called her the "blonde bombshell" or "Bubba’s blonde." Even then the relationship was said to be beyond official "friendship" — the description used by Stronach’s PR people — to Bubba. Bubba, of course, is Bill Clinton. Poor Hillary Clinton. That’s the last thing the New York senator needs.

My e-mail is [email protected]