When Plastic is Not Fantastic

I am told that it was a Kosovar who designed the original ‘I (heart) NY’ image. That makes me feel less weird about being a non- Kosovar writing a column based on ‘I (heart) KS’.

This new column takes as its starting point that there are millions of people - visitors and Kosovars, resident and abroad - who love Kosovo and desire it to be the best possible environment to live in. This week I am wondering about Kosovo’s national flower. No, not the bozhur peony, I mean the splashes of colour you see in the fields here that turn out to be plastic bags. Plastic takes 400 years to biodegrade. After 400 years the pieces of a bag taken home from the minimarket yesterday will finally be too small to be seen. Until then, that bag stays here, snagged on a branch, buried in a field or caught in a river, wrapping up the unlucky fish. This is not how anyone would choose Kosovo to be. It angers the people who live in the country and depend on it for their livelihood - farmers and fishermen. It’s often the first thing that tourists to the country comment on; it embarrasses Kosovan patriots. But what can be done?

REDUCE

If you’re buying just one bar of chocolate at a minimarket, does it need any carrier at all? Every bag we decline is one less piece of plastic blooming in Kosovo’s fields. However, from my experience, declining bags in Kosovo is not always easy. "Take it - it’s free," I’m urged. Following too many shopping trips which had degenerated into halting bilingual environmental science debates I’ve had some cards printed to hand over at the counter. Their slogan is simple, and written in Albanian, ‘Say NO to plastic bags. Plastic bags become garbage in Kosovo’s fields, trees and rivers’ (the accompanying Facebook group has the same slogan, ‘Thuaj JO qeseve të plastikës.’ Join the group if you’re interested, or contact me if you’d like some cards). An elite few shops in Kosovo don’t offer plastic bags at all. The Dit e Nat and Dukagjini bookshops both offer their customers strong paper bags. They’re biodegradable, with a low carbon cost. I’d love there to be more paper bag heroes like these businesses. It’s happened in Macedonia - I wonder how long it will be before a large Kosovo supermarket will follow this lead.

REUSE

Because when you go to the supermarket, of course you do need something to carry the shopping home with. It’s not easy to find large reusable fabric bags for this purpose in Kosovo, though they were once commonplace. Last month a shopkeeper gestured at my cloth bag ‘Hey, my granny used to have a bag just like that’. I think I would have liked his granny. A Kosovan friend in his thirties tells me, ‘when I was a kid and we went shopping, you always had to remember to take the big bag with you.’ A project is due to start in a village where this autumn where a newly trained group will be making such bags - simple, sturdy, reusable. The plan is that these cloth bags will be available at a low price at the checkouts of the biggest supermarkets. The supermarkets know that something has to be done. Recently Maxi and Viva started printing on their bags a reminder about reducing and reusing, and the environmental costs of plastic. A ministry of the environment directive ordered supermarkets to charge 2 cents for plastic bags at the checkout; it was suggested that this money should contribute to an EcoFund.

What happened? Some embarrassing scenes at the checkout when outraged customers dumped their shopping, refusing to pay if they were not going to get free bags. In one such argument the police had to be called. The ministry directive has now lapsed, biodegrading far faster than the polythene it was aimed to save. This story is an important one. It shows that it’s not just about calling on supermarkets to take the lead; in this case, they did. It’s not enough to ask government to do their bit; in this case, they did. In the end, we are the only people who can decide what Kosovo’s fields, and trees and rivers will look like for the next four hundred years. In a future column I want to announce Kosovo’s Green Offices - the organisations and businesses here who have made changes to the way they work to make themselves more earth-friendly. Do you think your office deserves a mention?

Get in touch.

Elizabeth Gowing is a founder member of The Ideas Partnership, a Kosovan NGO working on educational, cultural and environmental projects. Responses or suggestions for inclusion in future columns will find her attheideaspartnership@gmail.com