Eco bag mania

This week there’s been stacks of media coverage about the shopping frenzy for the £5 Anya Hindmarch ‘I’m not a plastic bag’ cotton tote. Sainsbury’s stores sold out within minutes, and they’re now available on Ebay for up to £200. Who’d have thought that a simple cotton bag would take over as this season’s ‘It’ bag?

Anything that stems the relentless march of single-use plastic bags has to be a good thing. In the UK alone we use over 10 billion of the flimsy horrors a year (that’s about 167 each). Not only are they a crazy squander of fossil fuels (8% of the oil extracted worldwide is used to make plastic), they can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, causing pollution and harming wildlife along the way.

A lot of press has commented on the fact that the Hindmarch bags are made from highly polluting conventional cotton (which accounts for c.25% of the world’s agrichemical use) rather than organic fabric, and I suspect some people might not use them as intended, loathe to stick their groceries in something they’ve queued hours / paid over the odds for. But I hope that the flurry of publicity will help remind people to say no to plastic bags, and look out for the many hemp or organic cotton alternatives appearing in the shops if they missed the Hindmarch model.

Banning the bag?

Perhaps inspired by the up swell in bag awareness, the papers have covered a number of supermarkets’ attempts to reduce plastic bag use. Sainsbury's is holding monthly Make The Difference days when it’ll stop giving out free carrier bags, instead providing customers with a free, stronger Bag For Life made from 100% recycled material.

Initiatives like this are a move in the right direction, but the shops would have so much more impact if they were bold enough to introduce a fee for all the bags they hand out – along the lines of Ireland's "plastax" of about 30 cents (20p) on each bag, which has led to a 90% reduction in use since it was introduced in 2002.

Sainsbury’s say they’re monitoring customer reactions to see if a longer-lasting bag ban is feasible – given the reactions I’ve observed amongst shoppers first-hand and in the media I’d say the time for change is ripe. Once you’ve had to pay for a couple of plastic bags, it’s not difficult to remember to stick a reusable one in your pocket before you hit the shops!

Unwrapping the packaging habit

Both the Independent and the Daily Mail have been running campaigns against excessive packaging this week. It’s great to see two very different newspapers taking up a shared cause, reflecting the broad range of people across Britain  infuriated by things that have an unnecessarily big environmental impact - the idiocy of shrink-wrapped swedes, apples in plastic cases or cosmetics in multiple layers of packaging strikes a chord with most of us.

112 MPs have signed up to the Independent’s Commons motion urging supermarkets to reduce packaging and encourage suppliers to reduce theirs further up the supply chain.  The paper is calling people to lobby their MPs to join the protest.  Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has been naming and shaming the worst packaging offenders.

Vatican issues green message

The environment’s also coming up the religious agenda. Last week Pope Benedict asked the billion Catholics worldwide to ‘respect creation’ while ‘focusing on the needs of sustainable development’ at a Vatican conference on climate change.  Although the Pope has made statements about the church and the environment before, this is his strongest link so far between a core Catholic belief, encouraging sustainability and preventing climate change.

The eleven major faiths are practiced by 85% of the world’s population, so anything that links religion with caring for the planet has a huge potential audience – which could potentially be mobilised into positive action to help protect the environment and guard against major climate change.

Spring is the new summer

It’s been the hot topic of conversation in parks countrywide, but now it’s official: April was the hottest and driest month ever recorded in Britain, and the media’s been full of images of packed beaches, parched landscapes and the hottest London marathon ever.  Parts of south-east England saw less than 1mm of rainfall, compared with an average of 51mm for the month.

Whilst basking in unexpectedly hot spring sunshine might seem a pleasant bonus of climate change, such unseasonably warm weather has its flipside. Wildlife experts are reporting that small mammals such as hedgehogs have struggled this spring as the warm weather lured them out of hibernation before insects and other food sources had become abundant, and the growing cycles of many of the food crops that we rely on may be thrown into turmoil. My own garden is already looking as dry as it normally does in August (despite regular doses of the used water from my washing-up bowl).

The Met Office has predicted that worldwide this year will be the hottest since records began, and I’m not looking forward to sweating out a summer in London that experts predict may hit 40 degrees this year. Until recently we were talking about climate change as a problem our grandchildren would have to deal with. It now looks like the problems will hit home far sooner than anyone anticipated.

Six degrees of climate aggravation

This message is rammed home in a new book by Mark Lynas published this week, which paints a sobering picture of what the world might be like as it’s increasingly affected by global warming.  Based on thousands of scientific papers, it describes what’s likely to happen over the 6 degrees C increase in global temperature that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts in the next century if we carry on as we are.

If the planet’s temperature goes up by just 1 degree C, Lynas predicts deserts in the heavily agricultural American west, and an ice-free Africa for the first time in 11,000 years as Kilimanjaro and other peaks lose their snow. In the Arctic, temperatures will rise much more quickly, speedily melting sea ice - bad news for polar bears and their friends. Most of the world's tropical coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, could be wiped out.

With 2 degrees of warming, every European summer would be as hot as 2003 – not nice when you remember that 30,000 people died from heatstroke that year. As Middle East-style temperatures sweep across Europe, hundreds of thousands could die, and Mediterranean holidays would be too hot to handle. At this temperature the Greenland ice sheet would completely melt, raising global sea levels by 7 metres, and food supplies would be severely affected. Meanwhile, a third of all species alive today may be driven to extinction as climate change wipes out their habitat.

Scientists estimate we’ve got less than 10 years to bring down global carbon emissions if we’re to keep world temperatures within 2 degrees of their present levels. Beyond this, Lynas describes a “tipping point” beyond which runaway global warming could be unleashed. The potential impacts are almost indescribable, although it’s all in Mark’s book if you’re feeling brave. Just bear in mind that last time the planet was six degrees warmer than it is now (251 million years ago), up to 95% of the earth’s previous inhabitants were extinct…

Give this book to anyone you know who’s still wondering whether we need worry about climate change!
‘Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet’ by Mark Lynas, Fourth Estate, £12.99.

And finally… journeys to the end of the earth

In the search for ever more unique holiday experiences, stories have appeared this week about a new phenomenon: ‘global warming tourism’. Special boat trips are being chartered to visit Warming Island – a new island that’s been revealed off the coast of Greenland as the ice sheet melts. And cruises of the Arctic are becoming a popular holiday choice. Ironically, all but the most local of tourists will generate a huge carbon footprint getting to these destinations, adding to the very problems they’re going to see...