Last month, San Francisco flashed the green light to ban petroleum-based plastic bags from grocery stores. A city council member said his Bay Area metropolis alone contributes 181 million plastic bags annually to the environment, harming marine life, littering the landscape and, of course, using up huge amounts of finite oil resources.
As a former San Francisco resident, I still love the idea that many life-altering movements begin on the West Coast and make their way East. Now a Colorado resident, these movements will come my way sooner than they might in New York, where I was born.
Why do we need all that plastic anyway? What do we need it for? Many Americans buy new, perfectly perforated rolls of plastic bags with which to line their garbage cans. As an obsessive-compulsive recycler, I use and re-use plastic grocery sacks – when I can’t get paper instead – though I try to avoid receiving the bags in the first place. When I refuse them, clerks look at me funny: “No bag?” As if I couldn’t transport that bean-and-cheese burrito from the gas station counter to my car at the pumps without one.
Despite this economy, I end up with zillions of the annoying white things, some of them stamped with their stores’ labels, some with the generic “Thank You For Shopping.”
What if everyone carried a basket or cloth bag, as they do elsewhere in the world, simply because it makes more sense than throwing away countless sacks into limited landfills? Every consumer in the United States ends up with hundreds, even thousands of them every year.
Each afternoon, I walk the meadows outside town with my dogs, fields awaiting new houses that once were home to pioneer dwellings. Blue and white plastic bags snag on tumbleweed and the occasional bush, ripping themselves to pieces in the wind. On these uninhabited acres, I find beautiful detritus: purple glass, fragments of graceful cast iron stoves, shards of 19th century porcelain, trekked hundreds of miles from the prairies. These ceramic pieces of other, older lives will become mosaic stepping stones to the door of my cabin, the glass will coalesce in sculptures which capture and refract sunlight in multi-colored kaleidoscopic flashes against the white-tipped Sangres.
I do not come to scavenging by family example, though I remain struck by a tale I heard in my 20s of an acquaintance’s grandmother, a Great Depression-era young mother, who saved absolutely everything: all rubber bands, string, rags in bundles, soap scraps with which to craft many-layered new bars. In my understanding, this Russian-Jewish grandmother co-exists with today’s child scavengers in South American dumps, sifting the refuse of our bountiful lives for useful and usable detritus. Why are we so careless with what we have? Why so in love with throwing everything away?
Long ago, on my first and last visit to Los Angeles to stay with a sister of a friend, we ate for dinner the vegetarian quiches I had so carefully prepared. Cleaning up afterward, the sister began to throw the remaining slices in the trash. I stopped her: “We can have them tomorrow,” I told her, imagining the tasty spinach-cheese-egg pie for breakfast with orange juice and coffee. “Oh, we don’t do leftovers,” she told me, completely unselfconscious in her gleaming kitchen in a brand new multiplex in a recently constructed development of a suburb north of the city.
As a nation, we don’t “do” recycling very well – not yet. Some places, like my former home of Portland, Ore., do it very well. There, one can recycle plastic bags as well as paper, cardboard and plastic containers at curbside. Modbury, England, has already followed San Francisco’s lead. But why don’t we quit bringing all this junk home in the first place?
Just as advertisers use public space (airwaves, placards in rapid transit, billboards) to promote their wares, why don’t businesses offer free, good-looking and strong cloth bags – made in America – stamped or sewn with logos and promotions?
What if being green was patriotic, even sexy? Why not?
Annie Dawid (annie@anniedawid.com), author of “Lily in the Desert: Stories,” will publish “Paradise Undone” next year.
