Wednesday, December 30, 2009

But I do try...

I am not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I do try to consider the impact of the things I do. One thing that I have been trying to get better at this year is to use my own bags when I shop. Not that long ago, I would only see a few people (hippies!) carrying their own canvas bags into the health food store or at the farmer's market. Now more and more people show up at main stream stores toting their own bags. Many stores have signs at the door as a reminder to shoppers and some offer a discount or raffle entry for customers that use their own bag.



Plastic shopping bags are forever; according to scientists that know about how this all works, they take many centuries to degrade. There are so many plastic bags flying and floating around our planet right now, they are one of the most common items found during litter clean ups, right up there with cigarette butts. In order to curb this flow of plastic, several cities in the state have recently enacted plastic bag bans with several others considering putting them in place. This is a trend that is starting to gain momentum, and if widely adopted across the country, could mean millions fewer plastic bags making their way into landfills, waterways, and open spaces.

I can hear the outcry with all the reasons why you need those bags. "I need plastic bags for diapers/dog poo/trash can liners", "I use paper bags for collecting my recycling/sort newspapers", but I'll bet we can all live with fewer of them laying around. Personally, I've found that since I get a plastic bag on my newspaper every day, I can save those and use them for my dog walking duties. I use a paper bag in my recycling station, but empty the bag into the bin and use it several more times (sometimes for a couple of weeks) before it goes into the curb bin itself. This has led to the realization that I should bring bags (and egg cartons) back to re-use at the farmer's market and that I should probably start to consider all the bags I get from places other than the grocery store.

In reality this is something fairly easy for everyone to do. I found the hardest part of using my own bag was remembering to take it back to my car after I had unloaded the stuff into my house. This was eventually solved by making it a point to hook them onto the door so that they were in the way the next time I went to leave. Also, I always have a small nylon bag rolled up in whatever purse I am carrying for those small purchases that come up as you are out and about in the world. Of course some of this could be solved by stores adopting the European model of charging for any bag you use. I still have a paper bag that I paid for in a Swiss grocery store that has been used within an inch of its life. I paid for it, I'm going to get my nickel's worth! This model would have to be adopted widely and consistently and would probably need a large scale public education program to support the change.



There are so many other things that you can do, but if we all try to start with this one simple thing in Twenty-Ten, we can slow the avalanche of thin, plastic bags around this big blue marble of ours. Let's all try.