Plastic Bags

Do you remember when plastic grocery bags didn't exist? I do. However, most stores offer them ("Paper or plastic?") to customers. Some don't even offer paper bags any more.

Did you know that plastic bags that we use daily (for trash, groceries, etc) consitute 10% of our oil use in this country? Seriously. It takes 430,000 gallons of oil to make 100 million plastic bags. Yearly, 21,500,000 gallons of oil are used to make 5 TRILLION plastic bags world-wide, most of which end up in landfills. They are hard to recycle, take forever to degrade, and blow around, getting stuck in our trees and waterways. A term my son used on a windy day a few years ago coined it well: Urban Tumbleweed. Some municipalities (Such as San Francisco) are banning the use of plastic grocery bags due to the waste that occurs with this mode of bring groceries home. Reduce, Re-Use, and Recycle don't seem to work very well with plastic bags, unfortunately.

I am going back to cloth bags ASAP. Some of the newer ones seem to be made of a fiber of some sort that seems flimsy, but are actually quite strong. I get those bags at conferences all the time, and usually get rid of them, but I have been starting to use them for groceries, and they work fairly well! They are now selling them at grocery stores in my area for a couple of bucks each.


For a little humor, take a look at this: This was on a bag I got from Target the other day (Target does not have paper bags, BTW, and cloth bags don't seem to exist there.). I particularly like item numbers 3 and 6.