I have bags. Lots and lots of bags. I love my bags. It is hard for me to pass up buying any cute reusable bag. I already know which one I will buy next. Trader Joe's has a new small-sized bag made entirely of recycled plastic bottles!I use them almost daily for grocery shopping, travel, trips to the river & park. I take them to the library to fill with kids books. I use them to clean out the car. Right this second, Lydia is dragging Rowan around in the big, blue Ikea bag. The possibilities are, literally, endless.
Despite the plethora of bags in my house, we have not been able to completely exclude plastic. My husband refuses to carry bags to the store if he is alone. I can only guess he thinks he will be mistaken for carrying a purse. Whenever I ask him he says we need the plastic for cat litter. I would much rather use paper for this. Plastic is bad for our environment!
My biggest motivator for using anything other that plastic is the giant island of garbage in the Pacific Ocean. Here is an excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle, "The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii." Read the whole article here. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL&hw=pacific+patch&sn=001&sc=1000
I also encourage you to read "Junk" one of the blogs on my blog list. These guys are really trying to raise awareness of the problem! And, please, invest in some reusable bags!
3 comments:
More to the point as to why I don't take reusable bags with me to the store is the fact that I'm usually doing some shopping during my work day. The plastic bags I bring into the home are mostly recycled, so not contributing to the floating mass in the Pacific.
I would be overjoyed to give you some bags to keep in your van! While I am very happy to be able to recycle the plastic bags, that is not a guarantee they will not end up in the environment. The biggest problem with them is how lightweight they are. The wind can easily blow them out of the can, the recycling truck or the recyling facility. As we are inland, that makes them more likely to end up in the river, creeks or delta.
Admit it, Jen, you have a bag fetish.
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