Saturday, July 5, 2008

Reusable Bags or No Bags

Recently, my girlfriend Kelsey and myself have been refusing bags at stores. It is a small step in trying to reduce our waste. At one point a few months ago we realized we had over 30 paper bags stacked under our sink. We were both very dissapointed with each other, and from then on we both used those bags over and over.

We bring our own bags to go grocery shopping. Or carry out our items if there are that few. The idea is simply to avoid using materials when you do not have to.

Kelsey recently acquired a reusable green energy bag made of cloth. We bring this in and out with us during shopping now and we have saved more than 30 bags in the last two months alone. I have also started seeing a few other people doing the same.

That is one benefit of this art tour, is getting to see how other american cities fight waste and go green. Billings, montana (where we are now) is very clean, and seems to be focused on casinos and drinking. However, a lot of the people here seem to have good attitudes about going green, and even refusing bags. actually we only saw that happen once, but it is still a good sign.

It does make you feel a little bit better about shopping, when you are not also wasting. Plus, you do not end up with bags floating all over the place when you get home. Try it, you may enjoy it.

Go bagless!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

i've definitely been bagless for a while now... i live in iowa and most of the grocery stores here sell the reuseable cloth bags right at the checkout. a lot of people use them, in the grocery stores as well as the farmer's market!

i do think that our recent tornados and floods have woken up more people to the damage we've done.

also, i heard somewhere that the city of san francisco has banned the plastic bags altogether. any knowledge of whether that's true?