I just received a wonderful slide show that I wanted to share with you, but I can't figure out how to load it here. I've sent it to many of you. Just let me know if you'd like me to e-mail it to you, okay?
The slide show is about the environmental damage done by plastic bags. Even for those of us who are aware of this issue, the slide show is educational. Other large countries, such as China, Bangladesh, and Rwanda, have completely banned plastic bags, and Ireland taxes them--which has reduced plastic bag use by 90%. There's a lot to know about the damage that the bags cause, but a couple of interesting points in the slide show were that 10% of the debris washed up on the U.S. coastline consists of plastic bags and the amount of petrochemicals used to make just a few bags could fuel a car for a mile--so we can reduce our foreign oil dependency by using fewer bags. Imagine if the whole nation went to cloth bags?
It inspired me to remember those cloth bags as I'm headed in the store. Personally, I love to use the cloth bags, as you can fill them to the brim and it makes far fewer trips, less hassle, and less waste to deal with afterwards--it's just the process of remembering to return them to the car and to carry them in the store with me, but I'm always so glad I did when I walk out with my 3 cloth bags to carry instead of 13 plastic ones to deal with! Oh, and baggers are becoming much more comfortable and familiar with these cloth bags, so it's a much more pleasant experience to use cloth bags than it used to be! Just FYI, if you don't have bags or forget, many shops are offering very inexpensive cloth bags near the front of the stores--we've been picking up Food Lion cloth totes for 89 cents apiece! So it's totally manageable...
Like everyone, I oscillate on remembering this sort of thing. Habit helps, though. My kids, especially Alex, get very enthusiastic about using the cloth bags, though they don't tend to remember them from the car. Alex always wants me to buy one, though! I generally do, too, as the price is so reasonable and I know we can always put them to use later.
Funny, but Alex asked me tentatively this morning, as we were going into Kroger, "Do you think it's rude for us to carry a Food Lion bag into Kroger?" I laughed, as I hadn't even considered it, and said, "you may have a point there!" Anyway, no one seemed to react...:)
A couple of other tips on reducing plastic bag use include not bagging items which are particularly large or have handles--like bags of onions or potatoes or oranges, bleach, laundry detergent, toilet paper packages, twin soymilk packs, gallons of milk, etc. That often cuts down significantly on plastic bag waste. I manage this by quickly setting these things back in the buggy as I help with bagging, and I often throw extra items in the plastic bags that have already been 'filled' by the baggers. I'm fairly convinced that I manage to cut down on the plastic bags by at least half on these visits where I forget the cloth bags--and when I include just one new cloth bag along with these techniques on a large grocery purchase, I leave with amazingly few plastic bags, generally.
I had one friend who, when she was single, would reuse all of her grocery bags in a small trash can for all her waste. While I thought that might not be very practical for a big family, I suppose it could work if daily trash duty were given to the kids (beware Alex!). Anyway, I'd love to hear what you guys actually do to cut down on your environmental impact, so that I know what's actually easy to do and what the fringe benefits are!
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