plastic wasteland

This morning both of my classes contained a "Here's something terrible about the world that will make you really depressed and angry, but instead of feeling horrible, you should do something about it" moment.  This is the first one:  plastic bags.

I could spend a long time despairing about the horrible-ness of what we have already done to our beautiful earth, but here's a quick summary.

• Globally, we use 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags each year.
• You can recycle them, but it's way expensive.  (It costs $4,000 to recycle one ton of plastic bags, when they can be sold for about $32.)
• They do eventually break down (after about 1,000 years), but then they become even more toxic and pollute the soil.
• Our oceans are literally filled with them.  Every square mile of ocean has about 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it.  Thus, they are also dangerous to wildlife.
• They are disgusting, toxic, and unnecessary.

So!  The point of that was to be real, not to be too depressing or guilt-inducing.  And the point of this blog post is to challenge myself and you to do something different!

Entire countries have banned plastic bags.  (Ireland, South Africa, Australia, etc.)  U.S. cities (Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., etc.) have started to either ban plastic bags or tax them to encourage people to find alternatives, and many of those changes have happened within the past year.  Which is exciting!  It means things are getting better.

We've basically messed up our entire planet in a lot of ways, but there are changes that will make things a whole lot better.  We can still start caring for our earth and all its creatures, plus our brothers and sisters all over the world.

Personally, I think it would be awesome if we moved away from plastic bags in Harrisonburg.  I know not everyone would be excited about it (in fact, a lot of Americans are surprisingly angry at the prospect), but there would be plenty of ways to do it that would make it semi-painless (subsidizing paper bags, providing cloth bags to consumers, etc.).  And I've been really encouraged by all the community-focused, globally-minded things that are already in place in Harrisonburg.

What do you think?