Plastic habits hard to kick even after bagless Bora Bora
Acouple of years ago, in a decadent, inheritance depleting act of madness, my wife and I elected to enjoy New Year’s in Bora Bora, Tahiti.
As its fairytale reputation suggests, the place was picturepostcard perfect. Or rather, those portions of paradise devoted to the resort lifestyle were.
The only quibble, a minor point, but if you hail from a country so given over to dairy production that it befouls its own waterways, one you have a sensitivity to, was an absence of milk. Well, not exactly an absence. More a paucity.
Even in the flash hotel that served as our temporary digs, it was something the otherwise accommodating fa’afafine concierge could not help us with. No matter the excellence of my wife’s schoolgirl French. No matter my charades-calibre, mimed approximation of a cow, her udders and the machinations of the manual milking process. The only white liquid outside of the stuff that hailed from a coconut came in packet form and was ghastly.
Facing the prospect of five days on a private island without real milk, we elected to go shopping before our departure. This involved catching a bus, a challenge in itself given language difficulties and anxieties about missing the water shuttle later in the day. Fearful of the consequences of having to go the best part of a week living in a bungalow without milk in our tea and coffee, we braved it all.
Downtown Bora Bora had charms that differed from those of the pampered tourist environs. A certain rawness on the street. Rubbish here and there. A French expatriate – the only partial English speaker – selling hot dogs out of a small caravan. And the general store, just the mecca we were after.
As we negotiated the aisles, attempting to decipher signage and products at odds from those of Pak’n Save, the locals were refreshingly indifferent. I was overcome with a profound sense of the monolingual. Worse was to come.
The closer to the checkout, the greater the feeling that something was wrong. Suddenly, it dawned on me. Everyone else was carrying bags. We had none. There were no store bags in sight. We had amassed sufficient provisions to winter over. How was it going to work?
Badly. As our groceries piled up, unpacked, Janine struggled to remember the French word for ‘‘bag’’. She was met with cold, dead eyes.
There were mutterings behind us. Finally, with a great deal of reluctance, a large paper bag was discovered underneath a shelf. It was made clear that we would be charged for it. It was made clear that this was not usual practice. It was made clear that we were ignorant foreigners.
All of this came back to me recently. The campaign to free New Zealand of plastic bags is not a new one, of course, and those with a greater sense of environmental responsibility than I – essentially, most of the country and then some – have been carrying canvas for some time.
However, only in recent weeks has the local Countdown stopped providing plastic bags.
The first five or so times this was a problem. Bloody-mindedly refusing to buy the $1 canvas bags on offer, I cut my coat according to my cloth, only buying what I could carry in two hands.
There was a degree of petulance involved. If the supermarket was going to try to tell me how to live my life, I would jolly well curtail my spending. Hit them in the pocket book. The do-gooders. Social engineers, that’s what they are. It’s political correctness gone mad. Where’s it written that a sea turtle has an unalienable right to a plastic bag-free ocean?
This attitude is quite difficult to sustain. Individual underspending has precious little impact on the corporate body.
However, I did have an interesting, if passing, conversation with the chap in line ahead of me the other day, who confessed he now only buys what he can fit in one bag.
If too many folk are thinking like this, Countdown profits just may take a temporary dive. You can bet your weekly discount specials such a possibility has been weighed up in the boardroom.
We didn’t see any turtles in Bora Bora. It wasn’t for want of trying. Mind you, we didn’t see any plastic bags in the sea either. Or on land, for that matter.
Let’s hope that one day the same can be said of New Zealand.