Try counting them up: how many plastic bags did you accept from one store or another in the last week? Or if doing that taxes your memory too much just start with your last trip to the grocery store and move to the present.
Jennifer’s Pharmacy in Clayton has cardboard signs hanging in its street window to educate the public about these wonderful conveniences. Here’s some of what I learned from the sidewalk recently:
Twelve billion barrels of oil are used each year to make plastic bags in the U.S.
With oil increasingly expensive, how much sense does it make to fritter it away on items that are actually “in use” approximately an hour? Once their fleeting use ends, they can be recycled. But if they’re not:
They end up in landfills or as wind-blown litter. They take up to 100 years to biodegrade, eventually breaking down into tiny toxic bits, contaminating our soil and water.
Oh, and by the way, the landfills where they biodegrade over the course of 100 years produce methane, a greenhouse gas 22 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.
Thanks to Jennifer’s Pharmacy, I’ll have more to say on this subject later. For now, back to you. What was the count? (And did you remember to include the plastic sleeves your newspaper’s delivered in?)
21st century tumbleweeds.
Well if you must use them, you can recycle at several grocery stores, which I do. Or you can buy reusable cloth bags for the purpose of hauling groceries, which I also do. These are very convenient and easy to carry. Also not expensive. Trader Joe’s, Sam’s, and Costco have these. In fact, Costco never “bags” anything. If you need to carry out a lot of little things, they will give you a cut down cardboard box that things come to them in. And these can also be recycled.
I annoy my family no end by bitching at them every time they bring something home in one of the damned things. I’m printing out this post and sticking it on the refrigerator.
Remember life before bottled water? Once you start noticing how waste permeates our lives, the magnitude of it is mind-boggling. Reducing it will be an empowering pleasure, not a deprivation. Enormous opportunity for creativity and taking control of our lives.
Costco and Sam’s could lead the way in re-inventing packaging. An entire new paradigm is long overdue. It will have to happen system-wide rather than piecemeal. When it can take less energy to transport a barge loaded with apples from Chile than a truckful of apples from a local grower, all our assumptions need to be re-examined.
I have a feeling answers will come from unexpected sources and not the environmental “movement” which has been rather sanctimonious, ineffective, driven by emotion, not science. Hmm remind you of anything? Organized religion maybe?
When insane is the norm: The typical gym full of people (who drove there) on electric treadmills, stair-climbers and stationary bikes industriously burning calories and sweating with fans and air-conditioners blasting, TV’s blaring and of course, plastic water bottles at their fingertips.
I would love to see a calculation of the amount of fossil-fuel energy used to burn food energy at the average gym!
Gotta take a walk,
Crista
is talking about getting rid of them entirely. The shops in pedestrian-friendly Brookside encourage the use of reusable cloth or string bags.
Brookside is a really fabulous part of town – if I could be pried out of my apartment and forced to live in a house again, I would live in Brookside, and I shop there frequently. I have noticed cashiers there asking for your bag before they assume you need to use a plastic one. The Price Chopper is on board, too – they sell a really cool synthetic version of a handled grocery bag that has a flat bottom that is made out of recycled pop bottles. They sell them for 99 cents and one of the employees there told me that enough people are using them that they are spending less money on disposable bags.