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It is time for BYOB! Yes, bring your own shopping bag! While we continue our journey throughout a busy 2010, it’s crazy to think about the amount of shopping we historically do here in America and world-wide. Whether it be regular visits to the grocery store as we keep our kitchen’s stocked for magnificent meals and tasty goodies or those sometimes dreaded (yet skillful) "6 bags on each arm" walks through the local shopping mall, all of it adds up to a whole lot of preventable waste. One of the most blatant examples of this waste is disposable shopping bags. An estimated 100 billion plastic shopping bags are used every year in the USA, according to the Wall-Street Journal. Most plastic bags end up in landfills and the rest frequently end up in rivers, ponds, lakes, streams or in the ocean, where animals can ingest or become entangled in them. Bearing in mind the amount of shopping bags that are consumed and wasted each year, the time is now to spread the word about the constructive benefits of eco-friendly reusable grocery bags. After all, the majority of us desire to give back to our families, friends and communities as often as possible. Creating a BYOB approach in our individual shopping habits is a straightforward method to do just that. If we are able to raise awareness at this time, the positive outcome for our environment is immense for 2010 and well into the future. Numerous metropolitan areas have already made gradual but momentous progress in promoting the use of eco friendly bags in recent years. Motivating consumers with plastic and paper bag bans, savings at the register for reusable bag usage and tax motivations are a few to speak of. Save the Bay’s 4th annual report on the most garbage-strewn sites in the region further demonstrates the need for BYOB. The 50-year-old environmental advocacy group focused on 10 explicit bay-area sites where nearly 15,000 plastic bags were recovered in a single day last year in their report. Here’s an excerpt of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kelly Zito. According to (Save the Bay’s) research, Californians use about 19 billion plastic bags each year, 3.8 million in the Bay Area. The average use time for the bags - made using about 12 million barrels of oil each year in the United States - is about 12 minutes. In addition to the hundreds of years it can take for a plastic bag to decompose in a landfill, the bags also force downtime when fed into traditional recycling equipment. Typically, the bags get wound into conveyor belts or gears and must be cut out by hand. Bans on plastic bags aren’t really the only helpful approach to scale back damaging waste attributable to disposable bags. PlasTaxes, which tax customers at the register for using plastic bags when shopping, had been first introduced by the Irish. John Roach of National Geographic reported in 2008 about the worldwide momentum that’s been building since Ireland instilled a PlasTax in 2003. The Irish showed they could cut down plastic bag consumption by 90% or more. Momentum is rising across the world, predominantly in America. From Washington, DC to Edmonds, WA to North Pole, AK, communities and governments are creating an international trend to scale back the unsafe environmental effects of disposable shopping bags. In the great state of Hawaii, the government is currently taking into account a bill to ban single-use plastic bags (SUP), or to ascertain a small fee make use of SUP bags. Have a look at just how smoking is becoming taboo in America. Indoor smoking bans have caught on like wild-fire. In the same way, who is to say the usage of disposable bags won’t turn out to be taboo at some point in the (hopefully near) future? The use of eco-friendly recycled grocery bags is definitely picking up steam. Our individual decisions to bring our recycled shopping bags can go a good deal farther than we imagine. That’s what BYOB is all about. Of course, plastic and paper bags need to be recycled and it’s crucial to keep in mind most huge retailers including Albertsons and Wal-Mart will recycle plastic bags for you (just have to bring them your accumulated stash). That being said, a BYOB shopping plan can make your life so much less difficult because there is no longer a need to accumulate that cabinet full of plastic bags or figure out what and when to deal with it. Keeping a few eco bags in your car or backpack is a good way to ensure you have them when required. Thus give back this year by remembering to BYOB! No matter whether it be in a convenience store, the shopping mall, or while grocery shopping, we can make a difference for our environment and help elevate consciousness one transaction at a time. For the battle to eradicate disposable shopping bag waste, 2010 is our moment.
Article Source: http://sports-articles.net
Albert Jefferson is a greatly accomplished journalist talking about eco and sustainability matters plus extending the ideal to organizations to employ eco promotional products specifically reusable shopping bags to portray mutually their trade name and recognition for this world.
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