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Teasers, Agitprop, and Funnies
maxwell at cowgirlfunk dot com
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Saturday, February 09, 2008
Plastics
By now you've probably heard of the many ways plastic bags are the minions of Satan, made of polyethylene, a petroleum product, ending up in the landfills but also in our oceans where they look like food to turtles and other sea animals. We've bought cloth bags, but simply buying them doesn't really solve anything. We're still working on the implementing our new cloth bags. We tend to shop daily and we don't always have the cloth bags with us when we go. (Or perhaps I have them, but I'm home with the baby who isn't feeling well, and Eric can pick up food on his way home, but he doesn't have the cloth bags.) We're working on it. At the very least we have stopped throwing away the plastic bags, and are holding onto them to reuse, and most importantly, recycle soon at a store near us. City Council Passes Bill for Recycling of Plastic Bags The City Council on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a bill requiring large stores and retail chains to collect and recycle plastic bags they give to shoppers. New York is by far the largest American city to enact so broad a measure to limit the environmental impact of the bags. Altogether, each year the country is estimated to use 86 billion bags, which end up blowing down city streets, or tangled in the stomachs of whales and sea turtles, or buried in landfills where, environmental organizations say, they persist for as long as 1,000 years. I think it's important to use the cloth bags, and we're working on being organized enough to do that. I look forward to soon being able to recycle the plastic bags we have now. Also, I have a special love for sea turtles. I had the opportunity to swim with a few in Hawaii when I was pregnant with our daughter. If I have a spiritual animal it may very well be the sea turtle. I understand not everyone feels that way. It doesn't really matter if I love sea turtles or not. At some point it goes beyond sea turtles, and even the ways that their lives effect the ecosystem at large, even back to my own household. Carrying my new goods home every day in plastic bags, never giving a thought to where they go when I am done or how disposable they really are is a symptom of living unconsciously, just one of the many ways I've been wandering through life asleep. I'd like to wake up for a while and see where that leads. In other plastic news, I've been turning over all my cartons, looking for the numbers in the recycling symbol before realizing that for curbside recycling in New York, the numbers don't matter. New York will only take plastic containers where the neck is smaller than the bottle. I didn't really take this in, even though I posted recycling info below. So what can I do with my recyclable plastics with good numbers (or bad) that aren't so shapely? And what do good plastic and bad plastic numbers mean? I kind of know, and I have a vague sense of places that might take them, but I don't know really. I'll try to look into that and get back to you. |
