Stop Bagging The Whales

In 2002, off the coast of France, a beached whale was found to have 800 kilos of plastic bags in its stomach.

To keep things like this from happening, my wife takes her plastic bags to the library where they can be reused to bag books. She also takes her plastic bags to the local Wal-Mart who will take them back to be recycled.

While plastic bags only make up two percent of plastic trash. Plastic in plastic bags stretches further, making it more of a menace. I would suggest, when given a choice, ask for paper. Paper can be recycled using less energy then recycling plastic and would save the whales and other things, as paper is easily biodegradable. By the way, biodegradable plastic takes a long time to biodegrade; on this subject, bricks are also biodegradable.

Paper bags however are not the answer. Our forests are getting rather thin and the price of wood goes up, like the oil, but the media however doesn't follow the price of wood. Because paper bags weigh more and take up more room, their transport and storage energy cost alone is higher than plastic. As a fire hazard, the higher liability creates higher insurance premiums. So now you know why most businesses encourage plastic.

What we really need to do is learn how to not be a throwaway society. By showing respect for all things in realizing that very little is actually garbage. This alone could do wonders to our attitudes about others. It just might bring down the divorce rate.

My answer to a solution would be to have retailers charge for their bags. This would encourage a movement that many have hoped for; the consumer would bring their own bags. This could create a whole industry that would create more jobs: A cloth grocery bag industry. Placing a value on these bags, they would cause consumers to do more than just throw them in the trash, they might be encouraged to reuse them. The money collected for the bags, after taking into account cost, what would be left over, profit, could be donated to local environmental projects (landfill cleanup).

What a wonderful world it could be.