PoconoRecord.com put together a slideshow on the dangers of plastic bags.
Intellectually, I knew a lot of this and already use cloth shopping bags when I go to the grocery store, but seeing the pictures… well, I’m a visual person. I just rolled up a lightweight canvas bag and stuck it in my purse for the other times when I’m out and buy something. I mean, do I really need a plastic bag to carry the greeting cards I bought? I don’t think so.
The other evening we were at a grocery store up in Riverdale, a little hole in the wall where we were probably the first non-Latinos who had been in there all day, and when we pulled out a cloth bag for our groceries, the teenage boy doing the bagging perked up and said, “A green bag! Those are great!”
The meme is spreading. Keep it going.
I am having mixed luck. My last visit to a store consisted of me saying, “I don’t need a bag” and holding up my canvas one.
The clerk put the single item in a plastic bag anyway and handed it to me with a smile, “In case it rains.”
In case you hadn’t encountered them in your meanderings about the web: http://www.reusablebags.com/
They’ve got some good stuff. Recommended.
Thanks for pointing that out.
It’s even worse than some of us know. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, known informally as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is a sargasso sea of garbage the size of Texas between California and Hawaii that is 90 percent plastic. Oceangoing vessels dump an estimated 8 million pounds of plastic annually. All that stuff gets slowly ground up into tiny globules that birds and fish “eat”: one study of dead North Sea birds found 95 percent of them had plastic in their stomachs — an average of 44 pieces per bird — and krill, jellyfish, and plankton are ingesting tiny pieces of indigestible material not visible to our eyes. (All this is courtesy of Alan Weisman’s fascinating book, The World Without Us; see my lengthy review on the California Literary Review web site.)