Let’s, er, unpack that for a moment. There are any number of commercial reasons a supermarket might prefer to pre-pack bananas. It creates a minimum purchase size, so people who want one or two need to buy five or six. It can help the store shift fruit of varying quality, size and ripeness. And it can help differentiate different varieties of bananas, and organic from non-organic, an important factor when you’ve laid off most of your staff and you’re relying on the competence and honesty of customers at the checkout. But there’s not really any benefit to consumers, who generally prefer to buy the fruit they want, in the quantity they want. Especially with bananas, where I’ve observed a higher level of fussiness over what exactly is under-ripe or over-ripe than with other fruit. But even if customers do prefer pre-packed bananas, so what? The customer is not always right. And consumers can be trained – the self-checkout is a case in point. The fact of the matter is this isn’t just about bananas. It’s 2018 and we need supermarkets and food manufacturers to drastically reduce packaging, not find new and unnecessary ways to add to the quantum of plastic in the world.

Globally, we’re adding an average 8 million tonnes of plastic to the oceans every year, researchers at the National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in the United States estimate. It was Clean Up Australia Day on the weekend, and once again plastic litter – along with cigarette butts – accounted for most of the rubbish in our waterways. At least things aren’t as bad as in Bali, where the ocean spews mountains of plastic onto the beaches every monsoon season. That’s partly because we’re not as densely populated, we don’t use as much single-use plastic (though we still use plenty), and we do a better job of containing our waste in landfill. It’s also because we have developed the habit of recycling. But we’re running out of space for landfill, especially in urban areas, and our recycling program could be about to come crashing down. In recent weeks there have been reports that NSW rubbish is being trucked to Queensland, where it’s dumped in landfill, but paperwork is issued to let NSW business and government claim it’s been recycled.

There are also reports warning of a crisis in kerbside recycling, because China is now rejecting imports of mixed recycling waste of the kind found in the typical household yellow-lid bin. It’s expected the stockpiling limits at local recycling centres in Australia will be reached within months, and the authorities are bracing for a likely increase in toxic fires. When I’ve spoken to members of the general public about this story, I’ve encountered general surprise that we export our recycling to China in the first place. We’re just shipping it away, hoping someone else will deal with it. Out of sight, out of mind, or so we thought. But now China won’t take our rubbish, and once the stockpiles are full the material will be sent to landfill. All those plastic bottles because people won't drink tap water, the cans you lovingly washed by hand to remove the tomato residue, the free newspapers that litter our front porches ... all dumped. If there’s a silver lining to the housing affordability crisis, it’s that land is now so valuable, landfill can’t be an option for long.

I’m hoping China’s crackdown will force us to finally confront our waste problem properly. Loading If private enterprise won’t do it, governments need to get involved in making sure there are appropriate recycling facilities in every state. Beyond that, we need to stop looking at recycling as the solution. Remember the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle”? Recycling should be the last resort, after first reducing and then re-using. We need to phase out things we can’t recycle, such as single-use plastics, completely.