Μake us preferred on Google I’m buying a tray of galaktoboureko and a kilo of ice cream for a visit to some friends. “Will you need a bag?” the shop assistant asks. “No, I’ll eat it here, come join me,” I didn’t say. I thought it. What am I supposed to do with the sweets without a bag? Tuck them under my arm? Balance the galaktoboureko on my head and hold the ice cream with my teeth? “You could carry your own bag with you,” says my environmentalist friend. And show up with a gift of galaktoboureko in a bag that reads “Anagnostopoulos Underwear Store, Large Sizes.” How elegant.
I hear the same question at the bookstore: “Will you need a bag?” No, I’ll just fit them in my back pocket, both the “History of Revolutions” and the coffee table book of “The 100 Greatest Paintings of All Time” and the “History of 20th Century Architecture.” I understand the need to reuse, to recycle, to avoid waste, to build a strong environmental conscience. But environmental conscience cannot begin and end with the bag I need to carry what I just bought. Nor can every single necessary piece of packaging be treated as some moral lapse I owe an apology for. I buy a bag not because I have some secret attachment to plastic, but because I don’t have a third hand or a personal porter.
The funniest part is that the question usually comes up after the product has already been boxed, wrapped, sealed with tape, or placed inside plastic packaging. Standing in front of this small monument to the modern petrochemical industry comes the critical moment of my ecological judgment: “Will you need a bag?” I feel like if I say yes, somewhere in the Atlantic a sea turtle will take its last breath because of me. And in fact, most of us do carry a cloth bag by now. Except, by some unwritten law, exactly when we actually need it, it’s always somewhere else. Recently, at a gift shop, they even charged me for the paper bag, and it wasn’t the first time.
So what’s the actual goal? Cutting down on plastic bags, or getting used to paying separately for even the most basic packaging of what we buy? In this way, charging for the bag, instead of functioning purely as an environmental measure, has often ended up looking like just one more small commercial transaction. The store passes the cost of packaging on to the customer, the customer pays to carry their own purchase, and we all feel like we’ve saved the planet. Meanwhile, tons of unnecessary packaging and plastic shells are still everywhere around us, giant boxes holding tiny objects, and products wrapped so carefully that you need the fire department’s help just to reach what’s inside.
I’m not dreaming of going back to the days when the shop assistant put a single toothbrush in three bags “just to be safe.” I’m simply asking that a basic, self-evident need stop being treated as a test of one’s environmental values. Let’s tell the difference between waste and usefulness, between excess and simple convenience. And above all, let’s not place the entire burden for environmental destruction on the person who just bought a galaktoboureko and is only trying to carry it home without covering their hands in syrup.
Source: Tovima.gr
