Your Banana Grew Up in a Plastic Bag
Submitted by PlasticLess.com Blog
Saying no thanks to a plastic shopping bag when you buy that bunch of bananas is good for the environment. It may surprise you to know that many intensively grown bananas are covered with a polyethylene bag when they are maturing on the banana plant. Here is what it says on a commodities website:
“Banana bunches are covered with polyethylene bags in order to protect them from wind and attacks of insects or birds, as well as to maintain optimum temperatures, creating a micro-climate.
I know first hand that agriculture can be very plastic intensive. I grew up in a rural farming area during a time when many of the cattle farmers were adopting new practices. Farmers that used to harvest one or two crops of hay from a grass field started cutting the grass earlier in the spring and making silage. Silage is kind of like sauerkraut for cows. The farmer stores the still wet grass in a tightly packed anaerobic environment where beneficial microbes cause some fermentation. The idea is to make the pile inhospitable to the microbes that would cause spoiling. Many of the methods used to make silage require huge sheets of plastic. Some farmers have access to a recycling program for this material, but many do not. I once walked down the length of a tributary of the Musquodoboit River looking for two missing geese (long story) and I picked up several large pieces of plastic that had been blown into the water from nearby farms.
Another plastic intensive practice that started when I was a kid involved housing baby Holsteins in individual plastic igloo-type enclosures. Dairy calves are not typically housed with their mothers since they aren’t allowed to nurse for long (if at all). Keeping the calves separated from older animals (and each other) reduces the incidence of contagious disease and the fresh air reduces the incidence of respiratory problems. Air quality is not always that great inside a barn filled with cows. In Eastern Canada where I grew up, severe weather or careless storage and handling would sometimes render these cheap housing units unusable. They would be thrown away. ‘Away’ is very big in Canada.
‘Away’ is pretty big where I live now as well. I noticed that some date farmers protect their crop with plastic bags. There are date groves as the edge of the Sahara Desert. I imagine that a lot of this plastic gets blown off the date palms and out into the desert. I took a three hour trek out into the desert and I have to say that it looks pretty unlittered once you get out of sight of civilization.
It really doesn’t matter how big ‘away’ is when you realize that plastic lasts ‘forever’. We are already finding that out in the Pacific Ocean where the plastic is gathering into a giant swirling garbage patch. The trees of Canada and the sand of the Sahara can only hide so much plastic.
Update: Just to clarify, I am much too wimpy to live in a place like Douz. I went south on an adventure, but I live in the most northerly and city in Tunisia where the environment is green (in color) much of the time.
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