MNN - Mother Nature Network

in the cardboard box and the box is placed in the car when I am done. When I was growing up the grocer used cardboard boxes instead of bags all the time. Its a mindset. Once I stopped before leaving home and asked myself what I needed to take with me, I would be calm enough to remember the darn bags. LOL My elderly relatives/friends never seem to have this problem.

sell and last decades, not a few years. The plastic or $1 reusable bags so many stores now sell which are not cloth but plastic blends, don't last, because the handles aren't strong, but that's why they are $1. The canvas bags I got from Seventh Generation in the early nineties and from L L Bean even earlier are still in mint condition and going strong. This issue is not the few here who may use plastic wisely and over and over and over, but the 99% of the population who toss them out. We backpack and hike a lot and be it the Sierras or along the ocean we encounter countless plastic bags that people or the wind have carried away. Have even found some of the clear plastic handled bags the stores use, wrapped around birds, seals, raccoons and on a deer's antlers. They smell something in the bag, get curious and then sadly get entailed. If wound the neck of a growing animal it can end up strangling them. 'Californians use 19 billion plastic bags every year. That's 600 bags per second! Far too many of these bags are littered and enter the ocean. Plastic bags are a primary source of litter because they are light and aerodynamic and are easily transported by wind into the watershed. Once littered, plastic bags essentially never biodegrade. Instead the sun breaks them into small pieces that choke and kill sensitive marine species such as turtles and birds. There is already up to 46 times more plastic than plankton in the North Pacific Gyre!'http://www.cawrecycles.org/issues/plastic_campaign/plastic_bags