An elderly family member, a decades-long smoker, wrote a letter to a younger family member, also a smoker, begging the younger fellow to stop smoking. The letter writer wrote a very graphic letter describing his dreadful symptoms. He was suffering the awful effects of all those years of smoking and wanted to spare the younger one all that misery. Did the letter work?
Nope.
Some folks learn lessons the sad, miserable, hard way.
The citizens of my state are now wrestling with a lesson in trash. Our state passed a law that will eventually eliminate plastic bags. Now, if you go to the store, you will have to pay for your bags, paper or plastic, or you can bring your own cloth, reusable bags. There have been numerous folks writing letters to the editor of the local paper who are outraged at this new reality. They are being inconvenienced, don’t want to spend any extra money to prevent trash, are even convinced that reusable bags will carry germs and cause disease.
Whine. Moan. Wail. Complain, complain, complain.
Really?
Eight other states have eliminated plastic bags. Life goes on there in spite of this. Imagine that.
I would like to invite all those annoyed folks…..no I would require those folks to visit a local landfill. I want them to see first hand what mountains of trash look like. Then I want them to explain to me why their convenience is more important than eliminating trash.
I’ve read a lot about plastic and it is a big problem. Lots of the articles talk about recycling and reusing. But we ought to be eliminating this stuff. It’s not like there aren’t alternatives. As I shop for products, I try not to buy anything that is packaged in plastic. I found laundry detergent in a plastic bag instead of a heavy duty plastic bottle. I buy dishwasher soap powder that comes in a paper box and I buy milk and juice in waxed paper containers. But look around your grocery store and note how much stuff is packaged in heavy-duty plastic containers.
According to Internet sources, Belgian chemist and clever marketeer Leo Baekeland pioneered the first fully synthetic plastic in 1907. He beat his Scottish rival, James Swinburne, to the patent office by one day. His invention, which he would christen Bakelite, combined two chemicals, formaldehyde and phenol, under heat and pressure. The need to preserve scarce natural resources made the production of synthetic alternatives a priority. Plastics provided those substitutes. Nylon, invented by Wallace Carothers in 1935 as a synthetic silk, was used during the war for parachutes, ropes, body armor, helmet liners, and more.
Plastic preserves scarce natural resources????? Say what????? Plastic dumped on the land and in our water pollutes those resources. How does polluting natural resources preserve them?
According to Time magazine, Finland has the goal of ending all waste by 2050. Yay Finland! As natural resources diminish and the climate crisis grows more acute, the notion of a circular economy has been gaining traction around the globe. Most modern economies are linear—they rest on a “take, make, waste” model in which natural resources are extracted, their valuable elements are transformed into products, and anything left over (along with the products themselves when they are no longer useful) is discarded as waste. In contrast, a circular economy replaces the extraction of resources with the transformation of existing products and essentially does away with the notion of waste altogether. Finland stands out for the comprehensiveness of its approach. Back in 2016, it became the first to adopt a national “road map” to a circular economy—a commitment it reaffirmed last year by setting targeted caps on natural-resource extraction. Like other nations, Finland supports entrepreneurship in creative reuse, or upcycling (especially in its important forestry industry), urges public procurements that rely on recycled and repurposed materials, and seeks to curb dramatically the amount of waste going to landfill.
I can just imagine the local folks outraged about eliminating plastic bags, weeping, wailing and moaning. As long as someone hauls the trash away and they can’t see it, it isn’t a problem.
Sigh. It’s very easy to ignore a problem until it turns into a vicious carnivore, knocks you down, and rips your throat out. Some folks learn lessons the sad, miserable, hard way.
I can easily imagine a circular economy and how to accomplish that and I’m sure many others can too. Let’s go there. Come on people. Life is about change and making sensible changes – that we control – makes life better, not worse.
No one needs to die from the awful effects of smoking, overdoses of drugs and alcohol: polluting the body, or creating mountains of poisonous waste: polluting our land and water and air. There are better, beneficial, happier ways to live.
And for the record, I’ve been using reusable cloth bags for many years. Once in a while I wash them. Using those bags has never even caused a sniffle.
Amen!!!!
Great essay!