bag lady

Oh! ...something I forgot to mention during the week.

Check out (excuse the pun) www.reusablebags.com This site was featured on Typepad last week, and really brought home the need for me to stop being lazy and carry my eco-shopping bag everywhere, have one at work, in the car, when you go out.

Sit for one minute and watch the numbers scroll at the top of their homepage, showing the number of bags as they are being consumed. Just watch as bags are needlessly doled out without thought all over the world. I actually got panicky watching those numbers scroll round A MILLION, just in the time it takes to browse the homepage.

And yet they still get into my home - like a virus you pick them up without even noticing.

So I'm trying to reuse as much as possible or hand them in to the dump to be recycled.

I last read it takes 50 years for a bag to breakdown. One bag, half a human lifetime.

When you think about it, if we didn't need the bags - they wouldn't be provided. We could retrain ourselves to go out with our own bags - we would probably buy less, because we would notice the bag was full and have some sort of limit on our spending...hm, that's interesting...?

Even creating biodegradable bags which people throw away at the same rate doesn't really solve the problem. If we think of the vast amounts of energy to make, ship, use, discard & recycle - we can cut out the whole loop just by taking our own bag - again, and again.

While I'm on the subject, please think too about the bags the rubbish goes out in. It is still incredibly difficult to pick up biodegradable binbags (although many shopping bags are now actually biodegradable if you look). Again it's something easily overlooked, but just another link to keep those plastics out of landfill.

Last week I was a lot better at reusing my own bag, I just see those numbers scrolling round... in the time it took to read this, a million bags were used.

My sermon is over, thank you and goodnight.

Comments

[amisha]

great post caireen! i have been amazed, since using my own bags, at how many i save just in my daily life... it's mind-boggling to think of that multiplied by 10, or 100, or 1000...