Why is it that when people go to the grocery store, the cashier puts practically every item in its own plastic bag? Have you ever sat and watched all the bags coming out of the grocery store in the space of five minutes? Where do those grocery bags go? My guess is mostly in the garbage. Some are used to line trash cans etc but some just get thrown into the garbage as their own trash. Then they get dumped into landfills where they never disintegrate. Or they get blown around and end up as indestructible strips of plastic that wrap around a duck’s neck or get swallowed by an animal…
I also don’t understand the concept of putting garbage in plastic bags. Most people take their little plastic bags from their various garbage cans and then throw those into a big plastic garbage bag, tie it up and take it to the street for garbage pick-up.
Why does garbage have to be that well preserved?
Here’s what I do —
I refuse plastic grocery bags. Even in a clothing store, I ask for the items bagless and un-tissue wrapped. For groceries, I use those heavy duty plastic reusable bags. You can fit a whole heck of alot more groceries into them and they stay standing in the trunk, unlike plastic bags that spew groceries all around. I used to use paper grocery bags and then recycle them to wrap packages but few stores have paper bags anymore.
As for garbage, I have two big rolling garbage cans and a garbage disposer. All the messy stuff gets ground up and goes down my sink. I must confess to using small plastic bags in my kitchen and bathroom garbage cans but I don’t put them in a big garbage bag. I simply toss them into the garbage cans. Other stuff goes into the garbage cans unbagged.
Just don’t get me started on water bottles …..
Hahaha. About water bottles … I only buy a few and then continue to reuse them by filling them with filtered tap water. 🙂
Hi Maggie,
I do the same. In fact, I don’t buy water bottles but I take home the ones I’m given when I do a school reading and then keep on filling them up. We have a reverse osmosis water system installed. When I was in Ukraine, there were no trash cans on the street and there was no litter. No one walked around sipping on lattes or water. And they used our (ie — North American) plastic shopping bags over and over. We coined them the “Ukrainian briefcase”.
Stores didn’t supply bags. You brought your own.
In a thousand years when they do an archaelogical dig and find these landfills packed with billions of water bottles in perfect condition they’re going to wonder about our supposed intellect.
Well, hopefully most people aren’t just throwing them in the trash. They’re recycling them. 🙂
I have my doubts about recycling. I see so many water bottles on the ground when I do my walks. Tim Horton coffee cups too. It would also be interesting to know how much of what’s put in a blue box gets recycled and how much simply gets put in the dump.
Hi Marsha,
The old janitor where I work used to take everything from the blue bin and throw it in the trash. We’d have to hide our recycling and take it out ourselves!
–Rose
Why does this not surprise me? Our blue box contractors won’t take all sorts of things like paper juice boxes with plastic spouts and all sorts of clear plastic items. Frankly, I think reducing is more effective than recycling. I’ve recently begun to read newspapers online and that has cut down on my blue box dramatically.
Yeah, I think I’ll cancel our paper. I haven’t even been reading it lately! And Jim always prefers to read the news online. I’ve been saving them to use when I pack my dishes, but then they’ll wind up in the blue bin.
–Rose
Hi Rose,
My blue box is much lighter without the newspapers. I have a LONG driveway too!