Illustration by myself.

This might be conjecture, I don’t know. This could be a purely anecdotal opinion, based on my growing cynicism towards our society that stems from the systematic shift in opportunity, environmental sustainability and financial security from when parents were my age. It could be bullshit, essentially. But its an idea that’s been floating in my head for a while now and I hope you can hear me out.

My idea, basically, is that I think the older generations might be obsessed with plastic. Now, obsessed might be too strong of a word, but there’s a reason this has been on my radar for the past three or four months. I believe that in some form or another, our elders have a kind of dependency on plastic packaging. What’s more, I think you can actually observe this in everyday life. You, yourself can probably notice this too.

So, what am I actually basing this on? The answer is the shopping habits of local seniors on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Life after graduation isn’t great. I spend most of my time applying and writing to places and publications that I will probably never hear from and spend the rest of my time thinking about what I’m going to do with my life. But what postgraduate life does afford me is a peering eye into the weird world of the weekday.

I live in the UK, specifically a small ex-mining town in Northern England. Looking online at the census demographics, in 2001, out of 20,000 people, 98.5% were white. And out of those 20,000 people, 86% of them identified as Christian. My town hasn’t really caught up with the likes of Manchester and Liverpool. We have a food bank, a disused Victorian swimming baths, and a lot of old factories.

So, my town is probably quite illustrative of most places in the UK that aren’t really connected to more modern ways of living. There isn’t much to do, and during the week most of the older folk go shopping. Coincidentally, so do I.

So, here I am every week, food shopping at Tesco and with the rest of the general public at work, there are elders abound. There are 2 things I’ve realised during these weirdly atmospheric shopping trips:

Older people love plastic

Well, it was bound to come up. So yes, I’m pretty certain that people, specifically those above a certain age range, love plastic. Why? What’s there to love? What’s so great about plastic?

Of course, I don’t think older people are intentionally or even consciously indulging in some sort of plastic fanaticism but when you start to look at what it is they’re putting in their shopping trolley, you start to notice a pattern. Loose apples — picked by themselves and put in a plastic bag. Bananas handpicked as a loose bunch — plastic bag. Tesco’s finest roast potatoes — packaged in a black plastic holder, sealed with a plastic film. Brocolli — wrapped in plastic film. Carrots — plastic bag. Corn, peppers, onions. Everything comes in or is (willingly) put in plastic.

But what’s so significant about that? Well, every foodstuff I just mentioned can be bought in loose form at my local supermarket. No plastic involved. And what I see is that the overwhelming majority of people seem to either buy prepackaged bags of veg or are picking the vegetables themselves and wrapping them in those handy plastic bag dispensers you see conveniently placed at eye level. When given the choice, it seems that people are choosing to use plastic even when it isn’t necessary.

What I think this boils down to is a mistaken sense of our own consumer interest. It is a facade of convenience. I think psychologically we might be attributing packaging to some kind of positive factor in purchases. Literally speaking, it is quicker to pull up to the fruit and veg aisle and grab each pre-packed variety of produce without a second thought than inspect the best-looking potatoes and place them individually into your basket. Although a very small matter, people will naturally gravitate to whatever choice they think is the best value, be that monetary or time-related. This is particularly true for choices that are ingrained into their daily routine (but more about this later). This is what I think our older generations might be doing.

I think we all probably give other peoples’ shopping a quick look over when we’re in the supermarket. But instead of doing it for some odd personal curiosity, I find myself searching for plastic produce.

It more or less goes something like:

Hmm, what’s that. Baked beans. Great! Completely recyclable, just paper and a can. Oh wait, it’s a four pack of Heinz snap-pots. Plastic containers and plastic film. More expensive than a few cans of own-brand beans, bad for the environment and ultimately contain fewer beans than any person should find satisfactory.

Or:

Okay, they’re grabbing a bunch of bananas, nothing wrong with that. But are they… yes, they’ve put the bananas in their own plastic bag. As well as the carrots. And the onions.

A particularly egregious example of pointless packaging.

The preference for plastic is also noticeable in how others react to you. I try to aim for a zero-waste lifestyle and luckily at my local shop, the freshly baked bread is not stored in any sort of packaging. You are expected to put the bread into the plastic bags they supply, but you don’t have to.

Now, whenever I go to the till with my naked selection of loaves, I’m met with a lot of confusion.

“You didn’t put this in a bag”

“No it’s okay, I don’t need one”

“No it’s no worry let me get you-”

“No, actually I’m trying to avoid plastic so honestly it’s fine”

What usually follows is that the cashier acquiesces, and my bread is left to travel home plastic free. This probably doesn’t happen everywhere, maybe I just happen to get questioned by chance or maybe people are just doing their job and don’t want to rock the boat. But it’s interesting to note that a significant part of the staff at my local supermarket is of an older age and perhaps more unfamiliar with the idea of avoiding plastic.

2. There’s nostalgia in plastic

1956 Du Pont ad for Cellophane

Now thinking about it, there’s more than this kind of superficial connection between older generations and plastic. It starts to make some sense when you think of when and how plastics really came into what we know them as today.

There’s a great video by National Geographic that succinctly details the relatively short history of our passion for plastics. It shows how plastics really took off during the 1950s as they made their way into the wider public sphere after the end of World War II.

The most important part of the video is the explanation of the shift from the wartime use of plastic to peacetime use. Companies involved in plastics had to find uses for the material that could be applied in everyday civilian life, and market them to the public. And thus, the plastic boom was truly born.

It is strange to think that uses such as plastic wrap were conceived out of this necessity to promote plastic products. To this day, cling film is ubiquitous. It’s used everywhere, for basically anything, under the idea that it will keep things fresh. It’s gotten to the point now where traditional methods of preservation and storage like jars, glass containers and cloths have fallen to the wayside. Hell, even in professional culinary settings you’ve got chefs telling you to put cling film on basically everything, and I mean everything.

Jamie Oliver presenting a method of cooking an egg wrapped in clingfilm.

Chefs Brad and Claire from Bon Appétit using plastic film and a plastic tub before putting the dough in the oven.

The role of plastic was truly massive in its reach and in the size of its production. Understandably, people bought into it. Watching old clips of plastic infomercials today can be a special kind of horrifying. But for a period of time so abundant with propaganda coupled with pro-futurist outlook, plastic really did look like the wonder material it was touted as.

If you grew up in this period where plastic was the taking over the world it’s not surprising that you’d be well accustomed to it being a part of each and every day. It’s always been there. It’s just a part of life. In some way, it probably brings up an odd sense of nostalgia. You were told plastic = good. So your shopping reflects that.

Plastic had not only entered the mainstream, but it had become the mainstream, and as a result, other alternatives got pushed further and further out of the public consciousness. Using cooking as an example again, plastic had managed to become the de-facto material to use. Clearly, thousands of years of human culinary expertise never once required an egg to be cooked in clingfilm, but in the 21st century, after the normalisation of plastic, here we are.

I think this has had a massive effect on how people of certain generations and those in subsequent generations perceive plastic use. Older people were sold a lie for decades, and we’re still seeing that lie live and breathe right now. It seems that the younger generations, in the face of absolute global environmental catastrophe, have realised that plastic has got to go. But for the older people among us, I think it’s time to re-contextualise what we see as normal.

I don’t want to demonise anyone who was brought up using a lot of plastic, because unless you were born in a zero-waste commune somewhere, we all have used our fair share of the stuff.

But it has become something you just reach for, sometimes without even realising it. I mean how couldn’t you? It keeps our leftovers fresh, it stores things, it packages our food, it holds our products. It's in our cars, in our computers, our clothes, our TVs, our games consoles, our cutlery, our glasses.

It’s in our shoes, our phones and now it's in our oceans, our food and now it’s looking like its even in our faeces.

Now plastic is really taking over the world, and it’s time for some change.

We need to collectively be acknowledging this plastic problem and we have to make big changes in what we’re using in our day-to-day lives. No more clingfilm. No more prepacked vegetables. We need to remind ourselves of the tried and tested methods of doing things, instead of relying on plastic to do everything for us.

Now, after reading all that I hope it's clear that I don’t actually believe that the older generations are all completely dedicated to plastic. There are obviously a lot of eco-minded and zero waste followers who are in the older age brackets and plenty of people my age are devout plastic consumers.

However, this problem stems from something that started around 70 years ago and the people who have been there from the beginning probably need the most help in realising how this stuff is killing us. What’s more is that they probably need some extra help stopping their use of plastic too.

Please, talk to the elders around you. Make them aware of the choices that they make each day and how it affects us all. Talk to your parents or your grandparents or even just the people you see every week in various aisles in your local Tesco and get them off their plastic kick.