This past winter, I was tormented by the view out my kitchen window. There was a white plastic grocery bag stuck in one of my Russian olive trees (the one that the squirrels had been eating the bark off of, to add insult to injury) and it flapped in the wind during all those snowstorms. Finally, in the early spring, I got a long piece of trim out of the garage and pulled it down and threw it away. Then a couple of weeks later, I saw a plastic bag stuck in a tree along the drive that I take to work each day. And then I started to see them everywhere, along roadways, in streams, stuck in shrubs and bushes.
It's a terrible thing to see the miserable evidence of our disposable society all over the place - particularly out in the natural world where it doesn't belong. So, as a tiny first step, I decided to try and change my ways.
I bought a red vinyl bag and I had a Subaru canvas bag that I dedicated to my own personal war against grocery bags. I try and remember to always have them in the car - and I shop to fit the bags. Your grocery store will probably give you a credit if you bring your own bag - it's a nickel credit or some small amount like that. But it's worth doing. And even recycling the bags is better than the one-time use most bags get - as my friend, Marie, says, "They make a great liner for a bathroom trash can."
On the Sierra Club website, they talk about grocery bags at length. You can check out the article here: www.sierraclub.org/bags/. The numbers they quote are staggering! As an interesting city-based movement, the city of San Francisco was working on a ban of all plastic grocery bags this past spring - read here to catch up on that story.www.nobody-knows-anything.com/2005/01/grocery_bags.html It dates from 2005, but fills in some of the background. NPR also ran a story on San Francisco's plans in the spring of this year.
If you're looking for canvas bags to use in your own personal war against plastic grocery bags, there are hundreds of sources - just google canvas grocery bags. You can get chic or shabby, but you'll definitely get green.
