I recycle. A lot.
I recycle the right things, the right way.
(Today I saw somebody’s old satellite TV dish in a community recycling bin. I’m pretty sure that’s not where that goes.)
I’m the kind of militant recycler who harangues everybody at the office about throwing cardboard away while turning lights off with one hand and fishing empty water bottles out of the trash with the other.
I worship the woman I saw online once whose entire year’s worth of unrecycled trash was something like half an eggshell and a piece of dental floss.
But I have a secret. A terrible, petroleum-based, seal-strangling secret.
I am hoarding plastic shopping bags.
And not, like, a couple. I am hoarding hundreds of plastic shopping bags, in preparation for the day when they become illegal.
I probably don’t have that much to worry about since only 10 states have banned single-use plastic bags. Apparently, there’s a partial ban here in Ohio on at least the county or municipality level, but you wouldn’t know it by the cashier who always double-bags all of my stuff.
I always think, “Great. Now I’m killing two penguins at the same time.”
To my credit, I reuse my hoarded bags as long as humanly possible. If they aren’t ripped to shreds, they stay in the game. Lunch, all-purpose carry-all, storage bag—you name it, I’ve probably got it in a plastic bag.
I don’t know why I even bother carrying a purse. I should just shove everything into a decades-old Kmart bag and sashay out the door.
Plastic bags are really, really, really bad for the environment. They take 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill, and it takes 12 million barrels of oil annually to feed America’s plastic bag habit.
And even though they’re made out of plastic, you can’t recycle them.
Fuck.
So why don’t we just go back to using paper grocery bags?
It’s the trees, stupid.
Plus, remember how awkward paper bags were to carry (or probably you don’t—you’re young and I hate you for it), and how everything always fell out of them?
When they outlaw plastic bags, will I even be able to use my stash? Or will I be fined like someone trying to smoke in a bar?
Maybe I can surreptitiously put my plastic bag inside of a cloth bag, which seems redundant because it is, but at least I would still have my trusty plastic bag with me like Linus’s blanket.
Meanwhile, my plastic bag collection grows larger, rustling in the dark of my closet like a plastic Tell-Tale Heart.
While we in the US are burying ourselves in non-recyclable plastic, some folks in Africa have it figured out: https://www.duniadesigns.org
And it's not just them. In the middle of nowhere, deep in the bush, this:
https://www.walkaboutsaga.com/in-the-middle-of-nowhere-people-are-doing-the-right-things/
We are slowly making them into sleeping bags for the homeless at my church. But we don't have enough old women who can crochet, and too many Walmart bags to ever get through.