Green Tip- Plastic Bags

Over the past weekend my wife and I had a child free night, so what did we do? We went grocery shopping (I know how romantic). Well I ended up turning this adventure into a learning situation for myself. This school year my kids have been learning alot about waste and things we can do to help eliminate landfill waste. One thing that has been addressed was the plastic bags we get at the stores and how many we waste. My wife has recently added two reusable grocery bags to the stuff that is floating around in our family vehicle, you know the ones I am talking about they come in several different colors. Well I had no idea how much one of these bags can hold, each bag probably had equivalent to two or three plastic bags worth of items in it. I also was not aware that some stores will actually give you a credit for using the recycle bags as opposed to using theirs, cha-ching$$$.

These reusable bags got me asking some questions and doing research. I already knew that plastic is bad for landfills and is not biodegradable, but here is what else I learned in doing my research: U.S. households dispose of nearly one hundred billion (that's right 100 Billion) bags annually, millions of which end up littering the environment and harming wildlife (just take a look at the side of the highway next time you are driving and I bet you will see a few). If you reduce your plastic bag consumption by just two bags a week, you would throw away at least 100 fewer bags a year. If everyone in America did this and we tied all of those bags together handle to handle we would make a rope big enough to wrap around the earth 126 times. WOW!

I know that sometimes plastic is great so if you do use plastic bags, please recycle or reuse them somehow. You can take your plastic bags back to many stores where they have recycle bins for them. I propose the new question should be: Paper, Plastic or Reusable?

Please pass this along...James