After watching this (watch it. Like, now) particulary well-made and enlighting flash movie a few weeks ago, not that I hadn’t thought about our wasteful nature as a species before [certainly not], I started observing how careless people are when it comes to plastic and especially packing and bags. I tried counting how many plastic bags I received in one day, and the number was somehow higher than my purchases in the same day. I recently read that 11.000.000 plastic bags (I have no idea about their mean size) are used each day in Greece alone. Using this number of bags you’d be able to encircle the earth many times. This figure is enormous, just imagine the kind of volume 11.000.000 full plastic bags can take, for a lot of those are used for garbage disposal purposes after shopping with them. Plastic does not biodegrade, so if anything is within the bag that actually does, it will not since it will stay in the bag. That breaks the circle of carbon, one of the environment’s most important bases of structure. You get plastic bags everywhere, just try to think of ONE shop that doesn’t use them. If you did manage to think of one, congratulations, but it is the exception that proves this rule. It would be nice if we started seeing more reuseable bags people can buy or even paper bags, which are recyclable. But of course there IS no way to recycle paper in Mytilini. But that’s a different story.
Secondly, there’s just so much stuff when it comes to packages apart from the product. I opened the box my motherboard came in and every little accessory and thingie came in its own plastic wrapping or bag. And every accessory and every part I got had its own little plastic packages and bags. And every thing you ever buy has its own little plastic package that won’t melt before your grandchildren’s grandchildren write down their wills. It’s pathetic. The world is filling with more and more plastic every day. What are we going to do with all the stuff? Oceans are filling with it, land is, our homes are… It’s just crazy. I really hope that at some point there will be a collective realisation of how wasteful it is to use plastic wrappings, bags or just plastics in general in such quantities…