Edel Coffey: Sustainability is about planning - as Roy Keane said: fail to prepare, prepare to fail
A bag for life, yesterday. Pic: PA
Last week, after years of living with an invasive species in my home, I decided it was time to tackle the problem with urgent and brutal action, cut it out at the root. I realised I had been living with the slow colonisation of my life for so long that it had started to feel normal, even though every room in my house showed signs of infection. It was time to eradicate my Bag For Life problem.
How many do you own? I can’t be the only sustainability monster with this problem, can I? Open any cupboard in my house and a handful of the things will spring forth like a ghoulish clown’s head on a spring.
Open any one of these bags for life and three more will proliferate, as if the bag for life is some rabidly breeding species that can propagate faster than Japanese Knotweed.
Why don’t I just get rid of them all, I asked myself rashly? But I have so much guilt about what to do with these surplus bags for life. How can something that is supposed to be sustainable have become such a source of anguish and clutter?
CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB
Not to mention the bag for life’s sister, the cloth tote bag, the ones that come free with every book publication, festival launch, or even clothing purchase. What are we supposed to do we do with these bags?
These bags are my very own Tell-Tale Heart but instead of a body under the floorboards, I have bags for life.
After years of tolerating the suffocating presence of too many bags for life in my life, it was time to address the issue.
I tried to calculate just how many bags for life one person really needs. When I do the big shop once a week, I use a maximum of five. That’s all I need. Five, just five bags for life. Not 50. But we’ve all been there.
You get to the supermarket and realise you’ve forgotten to bring the blasted bags for life because instead of putting the bags for life back into the car after the last big shop, you kicked them out of sight into the utility so you could instead scoff the secret chocolate croissant you bought yourself as a treat for doing such dreary domestic drudgery as the supermarket shop. Something you bitterly regret now at the supermarket seven days later when you realise you’re going to have to buy five more bags for life to add to your bag for life mountain.
As Roy Keane said: “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.” Sustainability, you see, is all about planning.
I have tried not to buy the bags. There have been occasions where I have found myself at the supermarket without my bags and decided that this time I would just do without.
I have on occasion brought my trolley to the boot of my car and flung every individual item into the boot because I could not bear to buy another bag for life.
I’ve also found myself precariously carrying and dropping various items of shopping in a refusal to make one more unplanned purchase of a bag for life, preferring to drop and smash a half dozen eggs than allow one more bag for life into my life.
But this is how the bag for life wins. It knows our vulnerabilities. It knows that when we go in for some bread and a litre of milk, we come out with nine other items that we forgot we needed.
It had to end. I went around my house gathering up all of the bags for life. Even the forgotten ones that hid in dark corners of the hot press or under the spare bed, emitting their negative cluttery energy. By the time I had finished, I had two bags for life stuffed full of other bags for life. But I couldn’t just put them in the black bin, could I? Wouldn’t that make me an even bigger problem? I found my guilt wouldn’t allow it. The bag for life is for life. The clue is in the name. It’s a commitment. You can’t just ditch them when the going gets tough.
Eventually, I came up with what I thought was an ingenious solution. I did a spring clean and filled the bags for life with no longer needed clothes, books, bed linen, shoes, and toys and took them all to the charity shop.
The house was finally free of all but five bags, which I had dutifully placed in the boot of my car for the next big shop. I should have been feeling utterly smug and organised, but I didn’t. Something niggled. Beating somewhere inside me was an inconvenient little pulse of truth that I couldn’t escape. I felt like my karma had tilted. Because I knew, deep down, that I had done a bad thing.
The reality was, somewhere out there, someone else’s bagful of bags for life was bulging a little bit bigger because of me.
