Hey lovely people! This post is my contribution to sustainablog’s Pedal-a-Watt Powered Blogathon that’s going on right now!
The long-running green blog (and new green shopping site) is publishing for 24 hours straight to raise funds for the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Northeastern Missouri. Go join the fun: read post contributions from around the green blogosphere, leave a comment to be entered in a drawing for some great green prizes (including a Cup Glove from yours truly!), and join in the Tweetchat at #susbppb.
Jeff, along with a ton of other green bloggers around the web, are going to be posting until 4pm CST tomorrow, so head on over and give them some love, or take a few moments to check out my little contribution:
I am a big believer in the power of small changes and am thoroughly convinced that one of the most powerful choices you can make is replacing disposables with reusables.
Americans use an estimated 90 billion plastic grocery bags every year. Billion! That’s insane. If we all made an effort to bring our own, reusable bags to the store, think of the difference it would make! We use abotu 330 bags per person per year, and you could replace all of those with just a few, nice-sized reusables.
This video that I ran across on Organic Nation is really eye-opening. It looks at the life of a plastic bag, from its first use to the end of its life:
The landfill footage really hit home for me. Just by keeping a couple of reusable bags on hand we can help stop that terrible accumulation of waste! It also gets into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and area in the Pacific Ocean that’s overrun with our waste products.
It’s heart-breaking, but at the same time sort of inspiring. What a huge difference we could make if we just said no to those little, plastic bags at the checkout.
Image Credit: Creative Commons photo by caronaf
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[...] to Becky Stiepe’s guest post at Glue & Glitter, each of us uses about 330 plastic shopping bags a year. All together, that [...]
SUCH a great post, thank you for this. A great reminder of the small changes we can make in our life that will make a BIG difference.
It’s interesting – here in Ontario, it’s become completely socially unacceptable to just use plastic bags. By law, the stores must charge for plastic bags (generally they charge 5 cents). Occasionally people forget or don’t bring enough re-useable bags, but people have changed their behaviour.
I wish that were the case here in the US!