I had to laugh when I got this shopping bag from a supermarket in Finland. Not because of the weird language or any of the other super weird stuff that makes Finland the special country it is. But because when I bought my shopping, I had a choice of this paper bag, or a range of branded, reusable cloth bags. I chose the paper one for old times sake.
When I was a kid growing up in Australia, you got your shopping in paper bags. To be honest, they were a pain in the arse. I recall my mum, three kids in tow, hauling all those unmanageable brown paper bags into a shopping trolley, out of the trolley and into the car, out of the car and into the house. You could only carry two, maybe three, at one time.
Then we were introduced to the magic of plastic bags. How awesome were they?! They were strong. They had handles. They didn’t fall apart in the rain and you could carry loads of them at once. They were seemingly unbreakable. But, oops, they also didn’t break down. And slowly – very slowly – we realised this was a bit of a problem. Then some clever folk invented biodegradable plastic bags. Excellent idea. And with time they got better at making them more and more environmentally friendly.
Finally, after the initial onslaught of environmental crazies who were totally anti-plastic bags, we all got with the program and embraced the idea that plastic is evil. Ever so slowly, plastic bags were phased out. To get them you had to buy them, or you could buy a reuseable cloth bag instead and save having to buy one the next time. Eventually, some authorities banned them and shops just stopped providing them of their own accord.
Now, here I was, after all this time, at an ordinary supermarket in Finland, smiling inanely at my paper bag. Turns out we were right the first time. It only took us forty years and a literal sea of waste, but we got there in the end.
*Why am I writing about paper bags in Finland in a Greenland blog? Good question. At the time of writing I was in Finland with my son on a piano summer school for kids from Greenland, organised by my son’s amazing and under-appreciated Finnish piano teacher, who started up the music school in Nuuk more than a decade ago. The kids spend a week learning from fantastic teachers from the conservatorium in St Petersburg and performing a final concert together. The trip is sponsored by the Sermersooq Council, Tips and Lotto, and The Nordic Institute in Greenland.
