More on plastic bags

A little rant:  I'm so dismayed that the OTL tournament resulted in a plethora of white plastic bags littered all over Fiesta island.  I'm a competitive marathon runner, and I run many many miles around the island.  The days after the tournaments, bags were literally scattered everywhere.  After my first lap, I took the next lap to gather up bags as I ran around and at least throw them in the trash cans, which are right there!  I don't understand why the clean-up for the event did not include gathering up the trash that blew all over.  It's especially troubling that the bags are right on our beautiful bay and will end up there if not picked up.  I can't believe that I personally ended up being the clean-up crew out of all the hundreds of people that actually participated in the event.  Oh well, I'm glad to have done my tiny little part to keep the bay healthy.  I would love to see a ban like there is in San Francisco or at least a tax like is being proposed in D.C. since obviously there is no general motivation to reduce or even control our use of these toxic white things.

Snowball effect

in a good way! I blogged recently on making personal commitments to going green and Lisa commented on getting rid of trash-can liners. "Let's put the trash in a bag and then throw the bag away! A bag just for throwing away!" Now that we've done it, it just seems so ridiculous that we ever used them. So the snowball effect is that, one, we didn't want to throw yucky food in the trash, so we started a compost bin. That has been amazing. Needs some fine-tuning so we can use it effectively, but I can't believe how much stuff we've put in there and how little it is and how beautiful the compost is. And then next, two, with our trash reduced dramatically just from those two measures, we became aware of "what the heck is in our trash, anyway?" Packaging. Hard plastic, plastic wrap, containers, food boxes. Buying without the packaging, it turns out, is hard! So I'm not sure if we'll make headway on the packaging or focus on something else while slowly figuring out how to get away from it. We have done a very good job of using reusable bags at the grocery store at least. If a white plastic bag accidentally comes home, it is actually painful for me with the inescapable images of our oceans and fish being filled with these sickening and non-decomposing useless pieces of petroleum based garbage! 

Lynn, co-owner Olive Branch Green Building Supply