look in the mirror – there’s plastic there too

Sue Carlton wants us to get rid of those single-use bags:

I do not like those bags, the litter, the waste.

… In this country we use billions of them a year, bags that can kill marine life and clog stormwater pipes, not to mention littering land and sea.

She suggests that if somehow forced (banned or taxed), we would “get used to” bringing our own bags to the grocery stores and retail outlets.

I wonder if she realizes that her employer, the St. Pete Times uses 160 tons of paper every day (2006). It takes between 12 and 24 trees to make a ton of paper, so a conservative estimate of 12 trees and 140 tons (circulation is down since ‘06), the Times uses about 1,680 trees a day. Every Single Day.

Oh, and to deliver, the company tucks that newspaper into a single-use plastic bag every day of the week.

That might be a good place to start, Sue. If you force your customers to read only on the internet, you’d save trees and plastic bags. We would “get used to” it.

Let us know how that goes.

PS: You can make a grocery bag out of your old newspapers (or buy one).