April 19th Green Tip of the Week

Question: Where can I recycle plastic bags?

Answer: Let’s re-frame this question.

The real question is, how can we stop using plastic bags — at the grocery store, the drugstore, the card shoppe, the dentist?  So many clerks, trying to be nice, stuff our stuff into plastic bags, and recycling the bags is a real problem.

How to avoid plastic bags?  Two answers:

(1) Buy a few of those re-usable polypropylene bags with handles that are sold in so many places:  Stop & Shop, Staples, Shaw’s, Trader Joe’s.  They cost about a dollar each. They’ll last us for the rest of our lives, dude. They fold up nicely and don’t take much room.

(2) For little purchases, like a book or a bottle of aspirin, tell the clerk you don’t want a bag.  Carry the stuff in you hand, pocket, or backpack. The Fairfield University Bookstore doesn’t use plastic bags any more.

Why?  Is this really such a big deal?

It’s a very big deal.  Plastics are killing our oceans, our wildlife, and us.  The amount of plastic in our oceans is staggering. Now toxic plastic “dust” in even being found in human blood and breast milk.  Here’s a great four-minute video, Ocean of Plastic.

The average: “Forty-six thousand pieces of plastic per square mile of ocean.”

So be very scared.  Be scared enough, this Earth Week, to give up plastic bags for good.  Yes, our individual choices do make a difference.

Happy-scary Earth Week!

[By the way, there are very few workable methods for recycling plastic bags. Not many of them actually get recycled into (say) lawn furniture, and many are shipped abroad--not a solution.]