Bye Bye Bags!

Look up there in the tree! Is it a bird, a squirrel, a plane? Nope, it’s a plastic bag! What a horrendous sight as it flaps haplessly in the wind. Yes the ubiquitous plastic bag. A mass product of the modern age of man.

What home is without its stash of plastic bags hidden in some closet?! The United States uses roughly 380 billion, yes that is billion, bags a year. That comes out to 1,200 bags a year, per U.S. resident. The question is what happens to all those plastic bags after we take them home from the grocery or department stores with our purchases in tow. Well some of us reuse them as garbage bags. Few return to recycle. Others may use the plastic bag as a receptacle for our pet’s poop. Then what? It can take a single polyethylene bag up to a thousand years to fully degrade. What the…huh!? So my dog’s poop will be mummified and dug up centuries from now and revered as a sign of intelligent life that once existed here?!

Only 1 to 3% is reused worldwide. The rest of these loathsome bags end up clogging our gutters and sewers or are found floating in our waterways. Not to mention the poor marine life and birds that end up ingesting them and die as a result! Plastic bags are the second most common type of ocean refuse after cigarette butts. Yikes, there has got to be a better way!

Over in Ireland the government mandated that merchants begin to charge customers a nominal fee for bags. That was back in 2001, now 93 percent of folks in Ireland go the reusable bag route. People change their habits quick when it hits their pocketbooks.

My philosophy is that ones conscience should rule ones choices when it comes to this matter. I have been doing the canvas bag routine for a while. I will admit occasionally leaving them at home and having to resort to plastic but the plastic bags I do have I recycle at the local supermarkets. As far as cleaning up after my English Bulldog, Ozzie, I have switched to the biodegradable (composed from earth friendly cornstarch) poop bags. They cost money unlike the handy newspaper plastic bags but I have soothed my eco-conscience using them.

I also have found a lot of chic looking canvas bags out there. You can make a fashion statement as well as an environmental one at the same time.

So are you ready to give up the plastic bag? It may be a little inconvenient at first but do you really want to add to the plastic dervish spinning out there in the ocean? Then next time you go shopping and they ask you “plastic or paper” be ready to answer “neither” and proudly present your canvas bags. Some sea turtle will be grateful!