Plastic Bag: Ballinamuck
Walking in to the village of Ballinamuck last year, I saw a lone plastic bag blowing in the street. A once more common sight thanks to our tax is less common today. But are we greener? We bin to bale, which is then exported, often to be burned on beaches in India and West Africa, if not dumped overboard out at sea. The amount of energy used to transport these, and the way they are disposed means it would have been far more environmental and less harmful to nature to have them all blowing about as the last of their kind was as I walked past it on the way to the shop on a Saturday evening…
It blew around on an empty street
The black and white dog barked as I pass
Heading to the shop on a Saturday night
Wonder is there an evening mass
Not that I planned as such to go
If there was, I had shopping on my mind
As I returned back to my cottage
The image of that bag in the wind was on my mind.
I saw it not as a dancer
As some of an artistic mind might
But I thought of it as a rarity
Once more common was the sight
I thought of the advances we have made
In our efforts to be green, the modern crusade
And smiled at the thought of how much we think
And how little progress in that direction we have made.
The other bags that should be blowing around the street
Got binned, in colour coded bins as advised,
Collected and baled, to be exported abroad
How little green the solution few have realized.
Somewhere on an open beach, maybe in Bombay
The bale is burned by peasents, toxic fumes in an Indian sky
That we have made progress in recycling we fool ourselves
Once more conned by a capitalistic lie.
Reference:
The other side of the debate on plastic bags (Canada)
