Environmental evils

The Keep Hong Kong Green! campaign totally cracks me up, considering how insanely polluted the place is, but things are getting out of hand, people.

In the grocery store the other day, I heard the following announcement: "Please do your part to protect the environment, and don't use a plastic bag!" To encourage shoppers not to use plastic bags, it has set up special lanes for people who don't need them, which is cool. Of course, there's like, two people in line for those lanes and 22 in line for bag-dispensing lanes. (Another store offers a refund of 10 cents if you bring your own bag. That's slightly more than a penny U.S., but I guess it adds up. I mean, if I remember to take my own bags 69 times, it's bus fare home from the office...)

It's not an unusual announcement these days -- encouraging the use of reuseable bags is all the rage -- but it's ridiculous in CitySuper, the grocery store I was in, because everything they sell is imported. Hong Kong imports most of its food; there's not enough land to farm here. But there's also a pretty big expat community, and us expats hanker for a taste of home now and then. To get it (or as close as we can get to it), we head for stores like CitySuper, which stock almost everything imaginable -- I've taken home good French cheeses, non-Hershey's cocoa powder, my favorite brand of French yogurt, and even the occasional bag of masa and a can of tomatillos. (And although they sell peanut butter, there are no Reese's peanut butter cups in sight.) It's expensive, but sometimes, it's worth it.

And it's totally bad for the environment. Every customer taking home their purchases in reuseable bags is not going to offset the damage done if the store continues to fly in brie from three different continents.