Plastic Bags

I thought I would start all this with a rant about plastic bags. I'm sick of plastic bags! I must get thousands of them a year, and I never know what to do with them. Oh, sure, I take the plastic grocery bags back to the grocery store, but I have a suspicion they just dump them in the trash. Do they really recycle them?

And what about the stores such as Target and The Gap, that give you those non-recyclable plastic bags. The Target ones have a plastic recycling number 4 on them, but nobody recycles plastic number 4! And The Gap bags don't even have a plastic recycling number on them. They appear to be indestructible (they are very thick plastic), so they should last in the landfills for centuries, I'm guessing. Plus, they're "Made in Vietnam". So that means we're shipping plastic bags into the US. Think of the energy that wastes!

Did you know that the US goes through 100 billion plastic bags per year? With 300 million residents in the US, that's over 333 bags per person per year -- almost one bag per person per day. In Taiwan, it's worse -- 900 plastic bags per person per year.

At least in some places, they're trying to stop this madness. Several towns in England have gone plastic bag-free. And San Francisco has passed a plastic bag ordinance.

At the very least, let's insist that stores such as The Gap and Target stop wasting resources by using these non-recyclable plastic bags.