Creating a Plastic Free World

How many times in your life have you meandered home from your local grocery store or farmer’s market, plastic bags bulging with delicious delights, dangling from your fingers? Perhaps after you arrived home, you unloaded your charges, placed your veggies, fruits and other staples into their new homes in the refrigerator and cupboards and then stuffed those bags into your closet where an overflowing mountain of them can be found-or maybe even just pitched them into the trash.

Billions of people have been living this exact routine for years, thinking very little of it. But now people are thinking about it. What happens to all of those plastic bags once they leave our hands? Where do they go? Don’t they biodegrade back into the earth so that we can just carry on and use more as we go along?

Well, the facts are clear: disposable plastic bags are littering our planet, causing health hazards to humans and animals alike and are choking our world at an alarming rate. The numbers vary, but on average, one plastic bag could take a thousand years or more to degrade-and that is given the optimum conditions of sunlight, heat, oxygen, and water. This means that landfills, colder climates and a host of other situations are not ideal circumstances for plastic to degrade at all.

So what do we do? I mean, we have to buy groceries, right?

The obvious solution is to stop using plastic bags. It may not suddenly solve the problem of too many plastic bags flying around on our planet, but it will help slow down the rate at which we are mucking things up. Throughout the years, with mumblings of how plastic bags are a waste, some businesses began to offer lovely cotton reusable bags. The odd time you might have seen a little old lady stuffing her leeks and strawberries into her cotton bags at the grocery store. But the overwhelming majority of consumers still strolled around with bags of this inside bags of that. It was normal; just the way it was done.

Recently, there is an awareness and effort stirring in the minds of even the most environmentally-unaware consumer in this world. In some cities and communities throughout North America, Europe and Asia-the worst culprits for using and tossing plastic bags like apple cores-it is becoming more and more common to see people marching into grocery stores with reusable bags in hand. In fact, we are entering into a shift in attitudes that is overwhelmingly positive from the standpoint of an anti-plastic-bagger: it is now barely socially acceptable to be seen with thin, disposable plastic bags hanging from your body.

How did this happen…and so quickly? Many businesses and communities are implementing plastic bag-free initiatives. Grocery stores throughout the world now charge money for plastic carry-on bags-and give you a discount if you bring your own. Some chains have just decided to stop offering them altogether, though they still offer paper bags or reusable ones for a small price.

Take a look around you the next time you are heading out to pick up some lettuce and beans at your local store or farmer’s market. Hopefully, you will notice that more and more people are abandoning those distressing plastic bags in favor of the kind that can be reused for months or years to come. It involves remembering to throw them in your car or to sling them over your shoulder on your way out the door, but when you think of the wild life you may be saving because of that one flyaway bag you decided to skip, then leaving the house without your bags will be akin to leaving the house without your shoes. You simply won’t forget.