Don't get sucked into the greenwash vortex

Do you ever get fooled by fake eco? I know I do. Less and less these days. But I still get caught out every now and then.

The first level of fake eco is pretty easy to spot, even for the casual observer. Actually, I knew this bag was plastic-lined. My Mum bought it for us when she was staying here. I'd just had my first baby and things were pretty crazy. I was grateful for anything like that.

And, hey, it wasn't a single-use plastic bag. It was nice and big, it sort of... became a standard for our shopping:

The plastic bag lobby is always telling us how unhygienic reusable bags are, full of Salmonella and E. coli, which is why we really need plastic bags. So I wash them in the machine. I put this one in the wash with some socks. Socks? Well... I know, but I don't want to put it in with the tea towels (dish towels), or... or my kids' undies!

The truth is, just like there is no away, there really is no place for plastic in the washing machine. Whether it's ordinary old synthetic clothes, or crazy hybrid fabrics such as this bag, little bits of plastic are going to get stuck on other things or go down the drain. For us, that ends up in our greywater system, and for for most people, it's the ocean. Whichever way, it's not good. Just like the pink ink in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, wherever you put it is problematic.

So the bag is getting old - it's torn at the seam and the lining, some sort of polyurethane coating, is perishing. It's no good for food shopping anymore, really:

And just like the pink ink, my very own microplastic - on the socks:

 And the picnic rug:

There is only one place for that bag. The bin. Which means landfill. It can't be recycled. Stripping the plastic coating from the canvas outer would be nigh on impossible. Perhaps I should think about returning it to the IGA head office? Hmmm. Extended Producer Responsibility.

Only hessian (burlap) and calico, or old backpacks and shoulder bags etc in this household from now on! I've always been a plastic avoider, but now that I'm an outright refuser, nay boycotter, I've become so much more aware of this.

Another example of fake eco is also pretty easy to spot. Something like, say, Lawson's Bread.

Here is a plastic bag disguised as a brown paper bag. Faux brown paper bag as Choice magazine called it. The whole loaf is wrapped in plastic. The brown paper isn't there to save plastic, or help us avoid plastic. It's merely to evoke an olden days' country bakery feel, even though its made by a big food business. You might get to thinking it's a small family company (maybe the Lawsons?) who bake this bread. (Lawson is also so evocative for us in Australia because one of our great bush poets, Henry Lawson, had that surname. (Why, is that his signature on the packet??)).

But no, there's no friendly Lawson baker family. Lawson's is owned by Goodman Fielder, a big company who own much of the bread found in Australian supermarkets including Helga's, Vogel's and Molenberg - (pretty ordinary) fake German breads, and La Famiglia, fake Italian bread. They are owned by a large Indonesian Palm Oil company.

And despite making so many breads, only one comes in the fake brown paper; Lawson's, because that one's about the olden days. My anti-plastic sentiments are deeply connected with my sentiments about real and fake food. When you choose to go plastic-free, it's a gift, because it really does limit your food to mostly real, unpackaged food.

But then the fake eco spotting can get a bit tricky. Take this brown paper that's actually quite convincing. For years, we bought SAFE recycled toilet paper. And we still do. Sometimes.

But we have concerns about what's in the recycled mix. Do BPA receipts go in there? Is that a whole extra dose of BPA in our garden? Our food?

So the brown paper packet is great. What's not to love with the (rather large, self-congratulatory) halo? And the hills and the butterfly? We have a composting toilet, and so I used to tear the wrapper up and throw it down there too. All good carbon for a desiccating biodegrading system, right? Well, no. A year later, when my partner was putting it under the fruit trees... wads of unbiodegraded plastic through our otherwise clean, soil-like compost. Nowhere on the wrapper does it say, not suitable for composting toilets.

Now, Safe, I think, is trying pretty hard with their unbleached, recycled loo paper. It's a pretty good product. I just wish they stated clearly that their brown paper packaging had a layer of plastic on the underside. It simply never occurred to me before.

Then there's a level of fake eco that's not even trying to be eco. But where you make a choice as a consumer based on a product's plastic-free status. Do you ever buy rice in a bag? If you can't buy from a bulk or wholefood store, there's a range of (usually Pakistani basmati) rice in the supermarket that comes in bags like these. I used to buy rice like this as it was in a plastic-free bag, and well, it was a kind of cool, reusable zippered cloth bag. I use these to line the crisper in the fridge, or fruit bowls, or line cupboards...

Today as I was pegging them out, I noticed something. The bag on the far left is calico. I can see that (not a rice bag). The bag on the far right is cotton. That I can see. But the two in the middle? One turned inside-out. I noticed they had plastic zippers. That's strange, I thought. (I'd just boiled them to sterilise them, too). Then I notice the two in the centre are ... kind of shiny in the sun. Almost positive they're not cotton. A cotton poly mix perhaps.

Shiny happy poly in the sun

 Plastic zipper:

(Hmmm.. just discovered that Riviana is an American company, too. All this time I'd thought I was buying a genuine product that was Pakistani-owned and produced.)

OK, well.. At least you're buying in bulk and not buying single-use plastic, right? True enough. But again, washing synthetic fibres, synthetic fibres up against your food - such as fruit or bread. It's not really a deplasticiser's dream. I bought these thinking they were just plain old calico. But I guess now, even in Pakistan, synthetic is cheaper than cotton. (And cotton has its problems too - a swathe of petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides are used in its production).

I know that this probably all seems like minor stuff in the scheme of things, but the more I move away from plastic, the more I become not just passive, but active in my avoidance and refusal of it, the more these decisions confront me. And I'm also getting a lot better at spotting fakeries, and stepping right around them!

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