This Sceptical Isle
- Mr Harrison
- Jan 22, 2019
- 2 min read
My curse in life – well, one of them – is that I can usually see both sides of an argument. If I can see the point in doing something, then about 3 seconds later I’m also likely to see that, from another point of view, there’s no point in doing it after all. So when this giving up plastic thing was first mooted, while one part of me was thinking it was a good and socially responsible thing to do, another more sceptical part of me immediately leapt to the conclusion that anything our little household could do would make not a blind bit of difference on a global scale, so why bother?
Of course, you can’t think like that – take that line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and pretty soon you’re not going to see the point in doing anything, ever, for the rest of your life. So you take the small victories where you can find them, you tell yourself that if everyone did just a little bit it could add up to a big difference… and you try to ignore the annoying sarcastic voice in your head who wants to sneer at the whole thing.
Here’s an article by Lionel Shriver on the subject:
Today I got home to find our National Trust membership pack for 2019 on the mat, wrapped not in cellophane as in years past, but in a potato starch bioplastic wrapper. It struck my inner Mr Sarcastic as quite funny – how to make National Trust membership even MORE middle-class. But bioplastics degrade in around 6 months as opposed to, er, centuries, so the bottom line is, anything I or the National Trust can do to reduce plastic waste is, by any measure, a good thing – and even Mr Sarcastic can see that.
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