Earth Day!

D'oh! I totally missed Earth Day! Anyway, it happened a couple days ago so.

I happened to come across an interesting web page about plastic grocery store bags. The site highlights an important problem that we should better address.

We use billions of these things every year and they are killing the environment, both in the production of the bags and their eventual decay at the bottom of a lake somewhere.

I try not to take them from the store. I use cloth reusable bags or ask for paper. In my part of the country, where environmentalism is as strange as a three-eyed frog, store clerks seem to get offended when you ask for paper or totally flummoxed when you use your own bag.

I once bought a reusable bag from the grocery store with some other groceries. I had forgotten to bring my bags in. The bagger at the checkout started to put my cloth reusable bag in a plastic bag. As I stared in amazement, the cashier corrected him. "Oh, you want your stuff in here?"

And the U.S. is not the worst place for plastic bags. In Indonesia, almost everything you buy comes wrapped in a plastic bag, which they promptly put into another plastic bag when you buy it. The bags are clogging all of the rivers and lining streets like a parade of dried up jelly fish.

So for heaven's sake, stop using the damned plastic bags already!