I have another story for you. It's about why one of our cabinets looks like the image above.
This past weekend, my wife and I went shopping at our new favorite hypermarket here in Jeddah: Danube (think Super Wal-Mart on steroids). These hypermarkets exist all over the kingdom and are the most popular stores for families when it comes to grocery shopping.
Before moving here, my wife had found some expat-authored blog articles about the ins-and-outs of grocery shopping in the KSA. She noticed a theme: many expats were complaining about the amount of plastic bags used by the grocery baggers.
They tend to put ONE ITEM per bag, three if you're lucky. If you try to tell them not to use so many bags, they first look at you like you have more than one head, then become annoyed. If you jump in and start filling up the bags, they will often walk away leaving you to bag your own groceries.
During the five months we have lived here, we have accumulated quite the collection of plastic bags. I do my best to find other uses for them, including lining the trash cans and carrying my lunch to work, but I can't think of many more practical uses.
So we decided to take recycling matters into our own hands by bringing our bags back to Danube and using them again. They are pretty hefty and will probably last a long time.
Danube is located inside a shopping mall. When you walk into the store, there is a counter where customers are asked to "check" other shopping bags, as to avoid using them to hide stolen groceries.
As we arrived with our used plastic bags, the man standing behind the check-in counter stopped us. He was thoroughly confused as to why we would bring used plastic bags to the store. He checked to make sure nothing was hiding in them, and then asked "Why?" We explained that we would like to re-use the bags. Still, he asked "Why?" I temporarily thought we might be having a language barrier problem, but after using the word "recycle", it was clear that he understood what we waned to do. He just didn't understand why we would want to do it.
After some back and forth, and some more confused looks, he let us go with our bags.
It gets better.
We finished shopping and hopped in line to check out. I went ahead of the cart to supervise the bagging operations while my wife loaded the conveyer. I took the bags we brought out of the cart and began bagging the items the cashier had scanned. Then one of the bagger dudes came over after finishing another wasteful bagging performance at another register...
As I was bagging, I looked over at him. He returned the look, began smiling-laughing (somewhere in between a smile and a laugh), then reached for a bag from his new bag stack! Argh!
I took the new bag out of his hand, put it back, and gave him one of our bags to use. After yet another funny look, he obliged and put 2-3 items in the bag before once again reaching for his new bag stack - again. Ugh.
For the rest of the bagging "session," I had to constantly remind him to use the bags that we brought and to put more than just a few items in each bag. I'm shaking my head as I write this.
I've mentioned this to a number of people living here and we all agreed: they use/waste a lot of plastic bags here.
Here's why this bothers me. Plastic bags:
- lead to a completely avoidable increase in the volume of waste that ends up in landfills
- take much longer to decompose
- break down, but never biodegrade
- clog and pollute waterways
- and any toxic additives, are consumed by animals
- average 20 minutes per use, but last in a landfill for up to 1,000 years
- are aesthetically displeasing
- are derived from petroleum
I brought this up in class today and one of my students told me about two organizations here in Jeddah that are doing something about this: Mawakeb Al Ajer, a secondhand store/recycling center and Trocheter (trash+crochet), a company that makes handmade products from trash (a process known as upcycling) - including plastic bags!
I'll be paying them a visit soon.
Many U.S. states, especially California (the greenest state of them all), and countries around the world have plastic bag laws that either limit their use or ban them altogether. In Shanghai and Washington, DC, two cities I have lived in, you're looking at 1 Yuan and 5 cents respectively if you want to walk out of a store with a plastic bag.
These laws work - and they would probably work here too. Hint-hint Saudi Arabia.