What if Powell River started thinking like—what it really is—an island?

When you go on vacation to one of the beautiful Gulf Islands, you think and act differently because you are on an island that usually has issues concerning things like fresh water, sewage and garbage disposal and, really, we have many of those same issues. There is no landfill here. Every bag of garbage that is picked up at your curb leaves the community on a barge.

Consider the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag. What if it was banned? Would it make any difference at all?

Suppose that every person collects about a bag a day on average. Powell River’s population, city & district, is estimated at 20,000 so that equals more than 7 million shopping bags annually. Depending on its thickness, a plastic bag weighs between 8g and 60g; so banning plastic shopping bags means refusing to import at least 56 metric tonnes of plastic (or 2.8 kilos per person) into our island community, 56 metric tonnes of plastic that, with precious few exceptions, we later pay to barge out as waste.

In the last year alone, I have noticed a definite shift: consumers bringing their own cloth bags when shopping. Advertisers have also noticed this shift. Today, I noticed a television commercial featuring two ladies at a supermarket whose check-out carts contained only cloth bags. Plastic bags have, in a very short period, become the exception and not the rule.

This has been a voluntary effort that many people have undertaken and, although it isn’t difficult, I still see more than a few people leaving the supermarket with a handful of groceries packed into multiple plastic bags when one cloth bag would hold all. To encourage people further, a couple of retailers are now charging a fee for plastic bags.

But what, you ask, do I use for household garbage, kitty litter, etcetera? Well, there are lots of replacements if a little thought is given to the issue. For instance, I now use brown butcher wrap saved from my cold-cut purchases to line my kitchen bin and then dump it into the biodegradable garbage bag in my trash can. Newspaper also works, but it definitely can get soggy. For kitty litter, why put it in the plastic bag at all? Just go straight to the bin with it. See? There is always another solution.

To recap: banning plastic carry bags means refusing to let 56 metric tonnes of plastic annually enter our community. If the average person weighs about 80kg, that is the equivalent weight of more than 700 people, more than twice the capacity of Dwight Hall. That’s quite a crowd for this town.