When cleaning out a jammed-full junk drawer recently, my new roommate found several dozen pairs of chopsticks. His immediate thought wasn’t stir-fry, but rather “kindling.”
This evening’s fire was started with newspaper and plain wood eating implements. They worked quite well, and got me to thinking about their disposable nature. If you think plastic forks and spoons are awful, take a look at these chopstick stats, courtesy of The New York Times.
When I lived in Seattle my under-sink trashcan was quite small. I could get away with this for several reasons: I lived alone, cooked frugally and took enthusiastic advantage of the city’s single-stream recycling program. Generally it took a week or more for the can to fill up.
Being an illegitimus frugalis, I never bought a single kitchen trashcan liner. Why should I, when plastic shopping bags were so ubiquitous? Even though I toted at least one reusable bag everywhere I went, the plastics had a way of accumulating:
I picked them up while walking home. (Once I also picked up some free ice cream this way.)
People gave me things inside shopping bags.
Sometimes I bought so much (usually from the used-bread, used-meat or dented-can bins that the order wouldn’t fit in my cloth bag, so I’d have to accept an additional plastic one.
I gleaned them while on vacation. My relatives tend to use plastic with happy abandon. Folded-up bags take up practically no room in a carry-on.
Thus I always had at least a few dozen bags on hand. That is, until Seattle’s ban on plastic shopping bags took effect in July 2012.
An easy way to reduce your carbon footprint is to bring your own shopping bags. Let me make it easier still.
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There is a cricket in my dad’s house. Upstairs. I sleep upstairs. I had planned to sleep peacefully upstairs, but three or four times per night the critter tunes up: Eek-eek-eek.
My eyes fly open and my heart starts pounding. The noise isn’t scary, just unfamiliar – and unfamiliar sounds trigger the hyperarousal has been my companion ever since my daughter’s illness. It’s the one part of post-traumatic stress disorder that I haven’t been able to shake.
I’ll calm myself down, finally doze off and it happens again. Eek-eek-eek. My dad’s home has a nice big downstairs and a huge basement, but naturally Cri-Cri just had to choose the penthouse.
I’ve got nothing against crickets – outside.
My newspaper didn’t show up today. A missing Sunday paper is particularly irksome because it’s top-heavy with sale and coupon supplements. Happily, another paper was delivered about an hour after I called the Seattle Times circulation department.
One of these days there won’t be a paper – and not because someone stole it, or because my carrier’s Saturday night stretched into Sunday morning. It will be because newspapers have gone the way of the dodo.
At that point I’ll be seriously bummed. So will dog lovers, bird owners and the thrift store cashiers who insist on wrapping each cup or plate you buy in sheets of yesterday’s news.
It’s so easy to denounce plastic shopping bags. They start to tear before you’ve finished filling them. They’re a waste of the oil used in their manufacture. They wind up in landfills by the millions, or floating along roadsides, or in the stomachs of marine mammals.
Some cities have proposed or enacted grocery-bag fees to discourage use. Other municipalities (and countries) have banned them outright.
Eventually plastic bags will no longer be a fixture in our lives. And I’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Wait! Don’t send the green squad over to tie a shopping sack over my head! I’m as dismayed by the waste of petroleum and the ubiquitous litter as anyone else. That scene from “American Beauty” of the plastic bag dancing in the wind was cute – but the moviemakers didn’t address the fact that the bag had to come down sometime.