The other night I decided to do the right thing by my hair and bought a "natural" hair dye from a health food shop. It was in a green box and everything. Ah, sweet naïveté!
The writing on the box told me that it was full of vegetable dyes and compounds, had no ammonia or resorcinol, and contained some hydrogen peroxide and a fairy-dust sprinkling of "dio"-I-can't-remember-because-I-threw-the-box-away
-but-it-ended-with-"benzene".
While applying the dye, my assistant and I found that our eyes were watering and we felt a little woozy, but we thought nothing of it.
Some 30 minutes later, I found that rinsing out this "natural" product out made the skin on my arms and legs very itchy.
15 minutes after that, I went into the lounge room to find that the family member who had helped me apply the dye was throwing up into a plastic bag.
Our "natural" experiment had ended in tragedy.
Come back, L'Oréal. All is forgiven!
Anyway, this segues nicely into my next topic: plastic bags.
There has been a bit of hullabaloo in the press recently about the rumour (and it really is still just a rumour) that plastic bags are going to be taxed 25 cents to a dollar at the checkout.
I was listening to a radio station where they were polling listeners about a tax or ban on plastic bags, and most people thought that it was a good thing. The radio DJs were recommending that everyone should be using those innocuous-looking "green" supermarket bags anyway.
But how much do we really know about the reusable green supermarket bags (and by extension, the colourful, reusable, polymer bags that many clothing retailers are giving out for free nowadays)?
Well, for one thing, they're made from polypropylene, a fossil fuel-based polymer. They are not biodegradable, and can only be recycled at very high heat, which means that most recycling companies in Australia put them into the "too hard" basket and consumers cannot easily recycle them. They are also bought en masse from factories in China which don't necessarily adhere to Australian environmental standards.
That doesn't sound very green to me at all.
Before these fake "green" bags came on the scene, development of a corn-starch based, biodegradable plastic bag was in the works, but goodness knows what's happened to that research now.
I have a few polypropylene bags myself, acquired before I did a bit more reading and research. Like many people, I was suckered in by the thought that I was going "green" and helping the environment. However, I am not accepting new ones, and I am going to use the ones I have until they fall to pieces or I finally find someone who recycles them.
If you would really like to avoid plastic bags, I suggest hemp or paper. Cotton is better than polypropylene but a lot of water, energy and chemicals go into its manufacture.
If you would like to know more, here is some interesting reading on the polypropylene vs. plastic debate, and about the furore surrounding plastic bags in general:
How green is your bag, from the Sydney Morning Herald, April 25, 2005.
Plastic bagging, from the Australian, October 2, 2006.
Bernard Salt: Going green means forever, from the Herald-Sun, October 23, 2007.
Ban on bags can't carry weight, from the Sydney Morning Herald, March 6, 2008.