Bolwarra woman Helen Hughes was trying to go on a plastic-free shopping trip for groceries at the supermarket.

"Plastic free? These days everything is in plastic. No way," a member of staff said.

Okay, I admit, it was me. But think about it. What's not in plastic these days?

Yes, we all feel guilty every time we see a documentary on the state of our oceans and the amount of plastic we're dumping there, but it's so deeply entrenched in the modern world. So convenient.

Before writing this I checked the web for a few fast facts and globally our plastic use is alarming. Mind bogglingly so.

One article in the science section of USA Today in 2018 told of a mass of plastic twice the size of Texas floating between California and Hawaii. Google tells us that Texas is just under 700,00 square kilometres in case you're wondering. The plastic garbage patch includes about 1.8 trillion pieces of trash and weighed 88,000 tons - the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets.

I'd hate to think how many more pieces of plastic we've dumped on our marine life since then.

So hats off to Helen Hughes. It would seem amid all this that every little bit helps.

For those interested in reducing their use of plastic, she offered some helpful hints and admits she drew inspiration from social media pages and a book called Quitting Plastic.

And just following on from that, with the government injecting cash everywhere in a necessary move to keep the economy ticking over, should there not be an emphasis on developing industries for the future?

Like plastic recycling. Like electric cars. Like battery storage.

Industries that will set us up for the future.

Or those massive infrastructure projects that would clearly be beneficial, but were previously deemed too expensive.

Maybe, just maybe, amid all the gloom and doom, there's a real opportunity here.

Rick Allen, Editor