Last night I went to Stop&Shop to stock up on food to bring to work so that I no longer spend $50 a week at the office cafeteria. Even though my cart was only half full, the lady bagging my food used about 15 plastic bags! One for bananas, one for dishsoap, one for pasta sauce.... this is totally unnecessary. I wasn't even asked if I want paper!I enjoyed reading this article on Alernet: The Great Plastic Bag Plague
Yes, I have bought the reusable bags from Whole Foods but between my car and moped, I don't always have them with me when I go shopping. After this market trip I think I am going to make sure that I have 3 reusable bags in each of my vehicles.They're ubiquitous. They accompany us home each time we shop. They swirl about our oceans, they cling to our trees, they drift down our city sidewalks, they adorn metal fences, they're consumed by animals.
They are an urban tumbleweed, a flag of the consumer era.
Each year across the world some 500 billion plastic bags are used, and only a tiny fraction of them are recycled. Most of them will have a short lifetime with a consumer -- they'll be used for the few minutes it takes to get from the store to home and then they're thrown away.
You might say, "But we reuse them once we get home!" Well, only 3% of bags are actually reused and they still end up being throw out at some point.Here are ways that plastic bags are awful for our environment:
- Turtles mistake them for jellyfish and suffocate inside them.
- Bags can take hundreds of years to breakdown, allow tiny toxic bits to seep into soils, lakes, rivers and oceans.
- The manufacture of plastic bags add tonnes of carbon emissions into the air annually
- Approximately 60 - 100 million barrels of oil are required to make the world’s plastic bags each year
- China uses around 3 billion plastic bags each day!
So, this frustration led me to Reusablebags.com, where you can buy cheap reusable bags online and learn about how to cut bag on your plastic use.
Here is also a short, humorous film about plastic bags.
Also, check out the Plastic Aint My Bag campaign.
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