I have been thinking for some time about the overuse of those pesky plastic shopping bags that you get at Walmart etc. It annoys me that baggers feel they need to put each item in it's own bag practically. At any given time you can find a huge ball of them under my sink. And although I recycle them now, and try to reuse them whenever possible, it is still a problem. Did you know that the average american uses between 300-700 of them per year? That's like 14 million trees per year, not to mention the oil that it takes to produce them. The other day I was buying some little thing (I don't remember what) and I told the bagger that a bag was not neccessary. She either didn't hear or didn't believe me, I don't know which, and she bagged it anyway. I went as far as to give her the bag back and asked her to please reuse it. I mean, I could totally carry this one item in my hand, it was not going to fall and break into a million pieces. Well I may have offended her because she looked at me with such a bewildered look.
I learned on the plane on Tuesday that Wild Oats is banning the use of plastic bags altogether and that IKEA is next. San Francisco banned them 1 year ago in the whole city.I read this on the Chico bag site:
"Plastic bags don't biodegrade, they photo-degrade--breaking down into small toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food-chain when mistaken for zooplankton or jellyfish." I didn't know that.
Jetblue's Earth day promotion (with the givaway bags) is called "One Thing that's Green". The premise is that each person can surely do one more thing to help preserve our wonderful earth. I remember thinking as a teen, how lame it looked to carry a reusable shopping bag into the store, but now that will be me. I am going to make a committment to try to use reusable bags as much as possible. The nice thing is that they compact down so little and they have a clip to hang on to your belt loop. So I am just going to keep a few in my car so that I am ready to go.
And that will be my one green thing. What's yours?
5 had something to say!:
I am SO into the living green thing!!! Thank you for posting this.
My most recent venture was buying reusable bags from Reams. They hold a LOT of stuff, and they were $1 each, so not bad!
I also started using Seventh Generation and Shaklee products. They're all natural!
all you write about is true. the plastic bags are very bad for the enviroment.
In Europe (I'm from Spain) some people are using material bags and don't use plastic bags. Moreover in the supremarkets don't existe the baggers, you put your purchase in the bags depending on your approach.
But all of this is useless because the mayority of people don't do this things in order to dont contaminate.
I hope you can understand it, my english isn't very well :)
Nice blog¡
Very interesting post. I liked all the facts you gave. I think its funny that you gave the bag back. I would have been surprised if I were that lady too. Also, I completely support this because I'm in Key Club (an officer next year) and half of what we do is recycling. So go Zeebee!
I am so happy to know that someone else has issues with the baggers at walmart. I want to scream when they put one or two items in a bag, what do I want to carry 10 different sacks in when I could carry 2? good post!!
Thank you for this comment. Everytime I look at my mountain of plastic bags I think, "shouldn't there be a better way?" And you just sold me on the reusable bags!
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