If you have ever been to Morocco, you will have seen abandoned plastic taken to a new level of street art. The roads, once lined with cherry and almond blossom, now carry volumous remants of someone’s shopping, sometime ago, somewhere. Ironically the day I first travelled in Morocco, I was told by my guide (who sounded disappointed) that there is normally more plastic by the roadside. That day it had been cleared away because the King of Morocco was scheduled to pass by – evidenced by smartly dressed policemen at every roundabout.

As you drive down many some country roads in England you will see weird black shapes draped in the trees. These are amiably referred to by local folk as witches knickers, presumably on account of the low flying stunts some perform.

Plastic, in it’s most pernicious form – bags, is due to take over the world. It’s already doing a pretty good job in the seas and has appeared as a meal to many a hungry sea mammal and fish. Now, we are told that as we eat the fish, we are consuming micro plastic. There is a place in one Ocean where currents bring together a country sized raft made of plastic bags; a new shipping hazard and a clear sign that we are out of control as custodians of planet earth.

Kenya is leading the rest of the world, having just announced a complete ban on plastic bags. According to the BBC News website, anyone found selling, making or carrying a plastic bag could be fined 38,000 dollars or face four years in prison. Presumably this means that the purchase of a box of twenty Kenyan tea bags wrapped in plastic sachets will land you in prison for eighty years. Good luck with enforcing that law as the 24 million plastic bags used each month in Kenya are going to fill the prisons, not many being able to pay the 3,040,00 dollar fine for the box of tea bags.

So what is the alternative? Many will remember market stall holders popping apples and pears into brown paper bags, several decades ago. But we are told, also on the BBC News, that a paper bag uses three times more carbon in it’s manufacturer and transportation. I have to query the inclusion of transportation in this statistic as any bag needs to be transported; unless the argument is that paper bags are heavier, in which case don’t transport them in a lorry that goes one way and comes back empty as most do in the UK!

The conversion of wood into paper using as little carbon as possible is clearly something that needs to be researched now! Traditional Japanese paper making techniques use nothing more than large tubs, trays, a local river and a pair of hands. Surely this process can be unscaled and factories run on carbon neutral energy sources. The problem is viewed as how we do things now, rather than taking in the bigger picture and fixing the it with new tools.

I have just finished clearing out the boot of my car, hundreds of minute shreds of plastic from a ‘bag for life’ that tore down one side. Provided they are capable of lasting several decades in normal use, this has to be a good solution to the problem in theory, if not in practice. Such a bag we are told, must be used four times to compensate for the extra resources put into it. A good solution if it can survive five trips to the shops!

I don’t know where biodegradable plastic features in the debate, as it is rarely considered. I expect it is going to be more expensive, but its use would be one strategy to give due respect for nature. In countries where supermarkets charge for the use of a plastic carrier bag, the extra cost is administered as a sort of ‘fine’ to deter use and encourage re-use. The effect, although welcome, is never going to solve the problem. The money charged could be made to pay for a biodegradable bag, but I have never heard of this in practice.

I have a fun discussion with some friends over dinner the other night, about a supermarket that requires customers to weigh their own fruit and vegetables, place each type in an oversized plastic bag, weigh it and attach a price label. The system is absurdly heavy in it’s use of bags protecting fruit and vegetables which very often have already a protecting layer provided by nature. I began to think creatively about fruit and veggie boxes, designed to be brought to and from supermarkets by customers. The green townies have their fruit and veg’ delivered in reused cardboard boxes, so why can’t it work in supermarkets too. A box could be designed to have compartments suitable for particularly soft items, with moulded shapes and maybe lids. The compartment could be modular and replaceable for seasonal variations. However it might be done, there is a design brief there for an industrial designer with imagination. The public and supermarkets clearly have a demand for it.

The King has No Clothes is a well known story where the subject no one speaks about is the King’s nudity, because he is King. Perhaps it is about time that Kings are made to wake up to the massive problem of waste disposal, rather than everyone carrying on as if everything is normal.