Digital Media and whatever else flows through my head…
Paper or… umm… paper?
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors have approved a city-wide ban on plastic bags from supermarkets.
I am constantly surprised at the reaction I receive when I ask for paper bags rather at the grocery store. I often get the ‘why would you want to do that?’ look from the high-school aged droid working the register. I sometimes get the deep ‘oh-no-he-didn’t, this old fart is going to make me reach down below the counter and drag out those dingy paper bag things that give me paper cuts’ look.
To which I return my ‘I’m doing this to save the World for insipid, ungrateful little wretches like you so just drop the ‘tude and do what I say’ look.
Our little household of two adults generates one small bag of ‘trash’ weekly. Yes, the bag is plastic but in this case it is justified. We’re not always real good at eating all the leafy veggies we buy and what remains after they have been in the ‘frigde for awhile is a fifth state of matter; not exactly liquid, not quite solid, but with a significant gaseous component. Anyway, to dispose of that in a paper bag would be… umm… impossible.
However, when recycle day comes along bi-weekly we put out two heaping bins of ‘stuff’. Our recyclables outweigh our trash by a factor of 15. Our town is also in the enviable position of getting paid for each pound of recyclable material that is picked up. So not only are we saving the World for insipid, ungrateful little wretches we’re also lowing our tax bill.
San Francisco to ban plastic grocery bags – CNN.com
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about 4 years ago
A friend and coworker of mine here at the Imperialist Capitalist Running Pig-Dog Military-Industrial Complex was a bag boy at Kroger back in the day they first introduced plastic bags there (early ’80s). He was assured that A) you could jam way more stuff into each one than into a similarly-sized paper bag without failure (so you’ll need fewer bags), and B) they were made from something derived from cornstarch, and were completely biodegradable in one to two months.
The problem with A) is that the local bagdroids seem to think one item per bag is a reasonable load limit. The problem with B) is that the statement is complete crap. Plastic bags in the environment seem to have a half-life on par with strontium-90.
Most places around here don’t even offer paper anymore. I have come up with many ways to reuse the zillions of plastic bags we get, but even then we accumulate more than we use. That being said, handling groceries in paper bags is a pain in the ass (although having a few around makes recycling newspaper easier). Now if more stores around here offered paper bags with handles (like many places do down in NC where we vacation), that’d be great.