China's landfills are bursting at the seams and will be filled to capacity in 13 years, so their government has decided to ban plastic shopping bags, at least the flimsy plastic ones that blow everywhere and end up in trees. The Chinese are also trying to clean up their image before the Olympics, according to an AP story today.Deep within the story, these facts caught my eye:
"In the United States, which has less than one-quarter of China's 1.3 billion people, the Sierra Club's Sierra magazine estimates almost 100 billion plastic bags are thrown out each year. The Sierra Club estimated that if every one of New York City's 8 million people used one less grocery bag per year, it would reduce waste by about 218,000 pounds."Here in convenience-driven U$A, the citizens mindlessly wait for anything they purchase to be placed in a plastic bag which they may take home to eventually find its way to a landfill or allow to fly out the car window and escape to pollute and kill wildlife.
The Chinese until quite recently shopped with cloth bags and baskets. But the arrival of big box stores also brought the ubiquitous and deadly plastic bag. The Chinese went from a sustainable form of shopping to that of the robotic western consumerist style of wrap everything in plastic.
Using cloth shopping bags is one simple action that anybody can do. Take a stand against mindless consumption and switch to cloth bags.
The image above of the turtle attempting to ingest a plastic bag is lifted from this site in Australia. Try Googling for images of plastic bags in trees for and you will find gruesome images of dead animals remains filled with undigested plastic bags.
