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?)