YouthTalk

MY mother was doing her seasonal summer 'spring cleaning', the neat freak that she is. The other morning she opened a cupboard as a mountain of plastic bags tumbled out - in all shapes and sizes, in all the gaudy colours of a circus flag. She shook her head, exasperated.

As we are a recycling family, we like to keep our plastic bags instead of tossing them into the wind, as some people do, looking at the skies of Bahrain. We reuse them and then eventually recycle them if necessary.

But, sometimes, the fancy flashier bags are made of mixed material that cannot be separated or recycled. Hence, the plastic bag treasure trove in our house.

So, sitting around the bags, watching them hopelessly and rather clueless, we had no idea what to do with them.

Plastic bags are quite useless once they're done carrying our load; they suffocate animals and fish, clog up everything and don't match anything you wear.

The reason why these infuriating plastic bags choke up everything around us is because for every little thing you buy, the shop gives you a plastic bag to carry it in. Even if you buy a loaf of bread, already wrapped in a wad of plastic, they give you a plastic bag to put it in.

If you fill your plastic bag too much and it's too heavy, they put it in another three plastic bags to prevent spillage. And, if they're just feeling generous, for the 10 bags you've already filled with their merchandise, they'll 'generously' hand over five more for being such a 'loyal' customer.

Will the madness never end?

It was with relief that I heard of the jute/paper bag revolution started up by one of the larger hypermarkets in Bahrain. Tough bags for a few fils that could probably carry double the amount that a normal flimsy plastic bag could.

And yet, there appears to be only a handful of these macho bags making their way to stores.

The 300 fils jute bags couldn't stand the competition from the never ending supply of plastic ones, yet the former stays for life while the latter splits by the time you're on the escalator.

Other countries around the world have embraced the paper bag concept, like the US, or the recycling/returning bags-for-shopping-credit concept, like the UK and India.

Louis Vitton and various other high-end luxury brands marketed jute bags that became the it-bag for a season because they looked that good.

Yet in Bahrain, there continues to be a waterfall of these irksome bags cascading never-endingly, multiplying faster than bunnies.

So, needless to say, with no means of recycling our plastic-mixed-with-mysterious-material bags, they went back into the cupboard, folded neatly, saved for a rainy day.

Well, who knows, with the rate the Artic ice sheets are melting, maybe we'll use our bags to construct a raft and keep afloat and live through global warming.