It wasn’t so many years ago in any American or European grocery store you were given the choice between paper or plastic bags to haul your groceries home in. We’ve learned since that maybe the most sustainable way to shop is to bring your own ‘this is not a plastic bag’ canvas bag to tote your goodies home in.
It is therefore amazing to me that at most major airports throughout the world we are now enforcing a new sort of plastic bag regime; one in which any liquid containing container (up to a limit in size) must be placed in a plastic bag handed out by airport security.
The icing on the cake came the other day when on a trip between Bangkok and Vientiane, I bought a bottle of Jack Daniels. The pleasant young lady at the King Power Duty Free shop at Suvarnabumi Airport carefully wrapped the bottle of JD into a heavy duty tamper proof plastic bag.
All of these plastic bags are being handed out to travellers the world over in an effort to prevent another aviation-related terrorist attack – or so we have been told. How long before we will wake up to the environmental damage that is being incurred our efforts to deter terrorism?
And what about my heavy duty plastic bag for the bottle of JD? It’s now in Vientiane, Laos: a magic land that is woefully ill equipped to manage plastic waste effectively and efficiently. They still don’t have the technology to recycle, so most trash ends up in a heap on the side of the street.
Perhaps there should be a serious cost/benefit analysis undertaken to determine how exactly we are deterring terrorism through the current plastic bag regime and also do some calculations on the environmental impact of current security policies. It may be that we are inadvertently terrorising the environment of emerging tourism destinations through our not-very-well-thought-out security measures.
Imposing the right rules with well balanced and objective reasoning is important, particularly when it involves tourism.