KEY POINTS:
Every time I go to the supermarket, I buy more of those recyclable bags. Why? It is not as if I am very waste-reduction minded in the rest of my life. I never actually recycle them.
Does anyone remember to bring them back to the supermarket on their next visit? Probably the sort of people who believe in astrology and think deodorant gives you cancer do.
Me, I just end up with more and more of them stuffed into the laundry cupboard, so they burst out when I open the door. I use some of them in the same way I used the old plastic bags - to put my newspapers out for Paperchase to pick up.
Who knows what happens to them after that - maybe they end up not-rotting prettily in a landfill. Presumably these more robust bags last longer than a fragile plastic bag, are used more than once and therefore fewer bags are needed. But I fear my motivation for buying them is more to do with being shamed if I was sprung unpacking my groceries in Devonport's main street in uncool plastic bags.
Using recyclable bags is trendier, with a slightly retro vibe - they're square like the brown paper bags of old.
But unfortunately for Air New Zealand, its new carbon offset scheme unveiled last week isn't so cool. You might feel a pleasant self-righteous buzz if you pay an extra $88 on top of your air ticket to fund a Manawatu wind farm, Hawkes Bay trees or research into bio-fuels. But the problem is, no one will know.
There is no "badging" as marketers would say. ("Badging" is when pretentious beer drinkers glug expensive lager out of the bottle so everyone can see the label). It is not au courant to talk about shame these days: among the chattering classes being ashamed is out of style like religion, large families and flat shoes.
But if you want to change the public's behaviour, embarrassing them works a whole lot better than guilt tripping them. If Air New Zealand really wants its scheme to work it should make sure those who opt in have some cool, covetable way of flaunting their enlightened status to the rest of the passengers. Surely they have a whole marketing department which could come up with something: a special Karen Walker-designed laminated pass or a Misery-branded temporary tattoo which declares: "I'm flying green".
Once enough early adopters were publicly declaring their allegiance to the scheme, it would be embarrassing not to join up - a bit like refusing to wear an Anzac poppy or refusing to fancy George Clooney.
Fear of being shunned is a powerful force - it is why people now feel obliged to at least look like they are doing something about their carbon footprint. No one wants to be branded as a selfish, carbon-belching war criminal.
It's the same with rubbish. In Auckland City, there are wheelie bins - so it appears everyone's amount of rubbish is the same. (Why is there no secondary market in wheelie bins? If you were virtuous, you could sell your spare capacity to someone like me who had an overflow.)
But on the North Shore our rubbish is collected in orange bags, so you can see how many bags your neighbours have put out. I always have more than anyone else in our street. Being badly thought of by my neighbours motivates me to cut back on my waste far more than the doom-and-gloom scenarios about the world being buried under a mountain of rubbish.
I am really going to build a compost heap. It is next on my list after I have thrown away all those recycling bags cluttering up the laundry.
