I recently saw a commercial for President's Choice green shopping bags - a durable, re-usable, shopping bag made from 85 per cent post-consumer recycled plastic. Then in the NY Times Urban Eye, I read about Anya Hindmarch’s “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” totes.
Now, apparently one billion plastic shopping bags end up in Canadian landfills every year. Americans throw away about 100 billion plastic bags a year. All these bags, made from polyethylene (petroleum product) require some 12 million barrels of oil to produce every year, and take as long as 500 years to degrade. In the meantime, they catch on power lines and trees, float on oceans and lakes and clog storm drains, and kill birds, fish, turtles and sea mammals that ingest or become entangled in them.
This got me thinking (always a dangerous feat), how could they (you know, "they", as in "they say....."), when plastic bags became widely popularized in the 1980s, not have foreseen what a huge, and totally unnecessary problem this would become? Like, there was NO inkling that we would eventually end up in the situation we're in now?
Amazing.
In other news, I had my groceries double bagged at Safeway last night.
I'm kidding! Sheesh, take a joke you fucking hippy.
3 comments:
You probably did get your groceries double-bagged then cranked the AC up to full blast as you drove your SUV home!
Oooh, I wish I would have thought to write that myself. Only you could make me that much more sinister.
What Im worried about is with the decline of plastic bags, this equals the decline of doggie poopsie bags. You will be hard pressed to get me to use a re-usable doggie poop bag.
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