The problem with plastic shopping bags
A couple of people on the HoB/D listserv posted these two links today.
The first is on the problem of plastic shopping bags (not off topic, since it affects wildlife).
And this one shows how to make reusable shopping bags.
What I found interesting on the first site, is that only 1% of the plastic shopping bags get recycled, and that “It costs $4,000 to process and recycle 1 ton of plastic bags, which can then be sold on the commodities market for $32″. (Maybe it costs that much because we ship our garbage across the world, so it can be recycled into new products to sell back to us.)
My son mentioned that where plastic shopping bags have been banned, people buy more plastic garbage bags. If that’s true, it doesn’t really help to ban them. The only thing that might help, would be if people chose to find some other way to dispose of their garbage. (I find that I have more empty cereal box liners and chip bags than I have garbage to put in them. And if something doesn’t have to be bagged, I just toss it loose in the can.)
Here’s something else I found last winter, shortly before deciding to “give up plastic for Lent”.
And I can’t find the other thing I found then about what would happen if humans disappeared. But the animated thing I watched said that the only things that would remain hundreds of thousands of years after we disappeared would be sound waves and plastic. That did it for me.
Tags: Lent