I have a bunch of canvas bags, and prefer using those since it’s more comfortable to carry heavy groceries in with those.
However, in the last couple of years, I’ve had to re-train myself back to leaving them in my car. Between the litter box, the dog walks, the bathroom bins, etc. I found myself unable to maintain even a modest cache of plastic bags to hoard in case of zombie apocalypse, or a local bag ban.
I now let the clerk bag my stuff into plastic bags for me, then load everything, bags and all, into my sacks once I’m at my car. My inner environmentalist hippie earth mother goddess gasped the first time I did this … until I reminded that bitch that we were utterly and completely OUT of cat poop bags at home. That’s right, none left. That shut her up.
I’m a cheap bastard and hate paying for something I can get for free, so buying small plastic bags irks me. I’ll spring for the tough, sturdy trash bags for the big kitchen bin. But cat poop? I’ll be damned if I’m buying bags for that, just to immediately throw them away. Gimme my free plastic bag at the grocery store - we still need a disposable way to transport raw chicken anyway, for sanitation sake - and there are so very few freebies in life.
I keep a sturdy plastic bag in my purse or pocket. I don’t want to carry tons of stuff while I’m walking, but it’s good to have a container for little/light things. Rolled up, it doesn’t take much space. Some people go more minimalist and carry a string bag, which collapses to almost nothing.
I know the ones you mean. We always have a pile of them sitting around in a closet or somewhere that we hate to throw away. I should cram a bunch of them into a small box and mail them to you.
If you make the assumption it’s just you changing behavior, you can always dismiss carbon reducing behavior as trivial. All the more if you make the further assumption that ‘they’d just sell it to somebody else’, ‘the same plane just departs with one less person’, etc. I’m not sure that’s very logically compelling though. Everyone sensible realizes that behavior changes would only matter if it’s lots of people. But activists and educators try to convince…lots of people to change their behavior.
Although practically I don’t believe voluntary individual behavior changes are likely to make a profound difference in world carbon emissions. And I don’t believe collective policies will either, if based on forcing people to lower their standard of living. Much cheaper ways will have to be found to reduce emissions at a given living standard, and/or ways to directly engineer the climate or remove CO2 from the air economically, and/or adaptation, or everyone is screwed. Huge carbon reductions at today’s tech aren’t going to happen IMO. It’s shown again and again people won’t vote for that once and if it’s demonstrated it cost a lot in terms of living standards*, and even dictatorships like in China have to keep people’s rising economic expectations satisfied. If it didn’t cost a lot it would easily happen. It’s not easily happening from which the straightforward inference is that it’s costly, despite the gambit of some proponents of radical carbon reductions pretending it’s not or that ‘somebody else’ will pay.
All that said AIUI anti-plastic is mainly about litter and ocean waste in particular, not carbon so much. Our municipality in the US now has a law requiring merchants to charge for $0.10 per plastic bag. I must say it has reduced our use, it just rankles to have to pay even that small amount so we generally bring the reusable bags or just carry small purchases in hand. It’s pretty unusual now for us to forget the reusable and buy too many things to carry bagless.
*broadly speaking, as in your example. Are rich world people let alone people in up and coming countries like China going to travel the world a lot less because it emits a lot of carbon? I just don’t see that happening. Airplane makers might reduce emissions per seat-mile by 10’s of %…but there’s a few billion people in countries where only a relatively small elite have been able to fly, but now transitioning or headed toward the standard of living where most people can afford to fly. Same with cars on an even bigger scale. It will swamp what one country can do, let alone one person.
Agreed. Environmentalists seem not to understand that Americans aren’t going to voluntarily subject themselves to the standard of living of say Burkina Faso. We don’t want to give up the freedom cars bring us, the space and privacy detached houses bring us, or the nice juicy flavor of hamburgers made from farting cows. Then you have AOC trying to attach them a bunch of socialist wealth redistribution programs that just alienate a lot of people while having zero to do with climate change.
When the beginning of school came around, our local grocery store always switched over to paper bags that came with book cover templates printed on them with things like Name:, Subject:___, and such. Late seventies through the eighties, at least. They may still do, but I can’t remember the last time I got a paper bag from the grocery store.
My Dad was a civil engineer, and had a drafting table at home. After the first day of school, he would stay up waaay past my bedtime, toiling away on the drafting table. In the morning, all the books would be covered for the second day of school. His meticulously made, perfectly folded and taped book covers, boldly labeled in black magic marker in that all-capital, technical lettering engineers and architects use made me the proudest kid in class.
I think I had the coolest book covers in my entire high school. The local retrospective cinema (the long-gone Cove Twin Theatre in Hermosa Beach) distributed a free calendar of the next 2 months worth of upcoming films. It was on sturdy stock, about 11x17, and each date square had a mini poster of the upcoming single or double feature. Most films played a day or two, so the calendar had mini posters for 30-40 movies. It was the perfect size to fold over a text book.
One month a new calendar came out, so I replaced the cover on my geography book. One of the films they were showing that month was “Barbarella”. The teacher glanced at my book cover, and then flew off the handle and went into a 5 minute rant about Jane Fonda and Hanoi and she was a treasonous traitor who should never have been allowed back into the country and on and on and on. It was a trip to watch this normally mild-mannered close-to-retirement guy go into a frothing rage, and more of a trip to know that I indirectly caused it.
That sounds like one cool cover. But judging from the Barbarella posters I’ve seen, I find it amusing that the only thing your teacher objected to was Jane’s politics.
I had to cut and fold my own covers, and know how this prepared me for life?
Not a damned bit.
I agree that many Americans feel entitled to big cars, detached homes, hamburgers, and cheap plastic bags, but the trend seems to be moving toward ride sharing, apartments, veggie burgers, and reusable bags.
