Bag Lady
Meet my canvas bags. I love my canvas bags because they are so handy, durable, and personally mine. I use them all the time, and I try to keep them in the car so they are ready to hold everything. We use them at the grocery store, farmer's market, garage sales, in lieu of a diaper bag for adventures, for anything & everything. You can buy some fancy-schmancy bags that might be more your style at Reusable Bags, and gain some great information like a form letter you could send to your government officials to implement a plastic bag consumption tax.
Here's my bag line-up:
Free w/membership
Free w/membership
Teacher's Goodie Bag
Left behind by a 6th grader
Promo @ The Body Shop
Free w/membership
Book of the Month Club
Gift Bag
Art's Tour
Free w/membership
Garage Sale find .50
Free @ birthing class
Giant Ikea Bag, which holds all the above bags.
Box of bags & Bag of bags
But look at the last picture. Even though I'm very diligent at always using canvas bags, you can see that I have a brown paper bag filled with other paper bags, and an old kitchen bag box filled to the brim with plastic grocery bags. BAGS! Ughh, we still end up with too many bags. If I forget a bag at the store, I always refuse one of theirs and just carry the items in hand. Most of the time the checker is shocked, "Are you SURE you don't want a bag for that?" And unless I've bought a bunch of little dibble dobbles, "I'm sure". We reuse the plastic bags to pick up Jolie's poop when we're out & about - otherwise a shovel works just fine; and we use the paper bags over & over again.
My Bag Goals:
1. Send a copy of this letter to my appropriate government officials concerning a plastic bag consumption tax, and to follow up as needed.
2. Redouble my efforts in not accepting bags of any kind. Be like a boy scout and always be prepared.
Check this out, in "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore states: An estimated 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are consumed world-wide every year. In the U.S. alone, an estimated 12,000,000 barrels of oil are required to produce the 100 billion consumed annually. Furthermore, paper bags are no better than plastic. Paper bag production delivers a global warming double-whammy -- forests (major absorbers of greenhouse gases) have to be cut down, and then the subsequent manufacturing of bags produces greenhouse gases. In short, carry a reusable bag and when asked paper or plastic, say neither... (pgs. 315-316).
I don't know about you, but those are C R A Z Y numbers to me. This is consumerism gone umuck. Aren't disposible bags exorbitant?
posted by Vicki's Vegan Vice @ 11:24 PM
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