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A few years ago I was researching for an article I wanted to write, and I came across such a ridiculously easy way to do Something Good, that I could have slapped my forehead in the universal gesture for “Duh!” Implementing this one takes practically no effort at all on your part, but if enough of us did it . . .
In our house, it’s the bottom left-hand drawer in the kitchen. If, heaven forbid, you need to open that drawer, be prepared. What you’re likely to experience is something along the lines of a rustling, brown-and-white monster that seems to expand as if the tiny amount of light allowed by opening the drawer were feeding its living, radioactively-enhanced cellular structure. The plastic monster grows and expands as it attempts to escape its confines.
This is where we keep the grocery bags. After each trip to the store, they get wadded up; and I attempt to stuff yet another one in without the others realizing their long-anticipated dream of a coup. I did discover that stuffing them into a used Kleenex box is a fairly effective means of keeping them corralled.
Ours is a somewhat ecologically-minded household, so we keep these bags in order to reuse them in the future. They actually come in handy quite often. My main use for these crinkly suckers is to line smaller wastebaskets throughout the house. I don’t see any need to buy wastebasket liners when they’re just giving these things away for free. I’ve heard of some other great uses, such as:
Use them to line paint pans for easier cleanup when you’re working on decorating projects.
Hang one in the backseat of your car to keep trash from ending up on the floor.
Take a couple on overnight trips to keep your dirty clothes segregated from the clean ones.
And my personal favorite:
Keep one in the glove box to offer to people who “forgot” theirs while walking their dogs.
The suggestion that I came across that left me wondering “Why haven’t I been doing that all along?” was to just turn down the checker’s offer altogether. When asked “Paper or plastic?” it’s perfectly acceptable to reply, “Neither, thanks.” If you’re only picking up a few items, do you really need to put them into a plastic bag for the trip from the store to the car and from the car into the house? Nah!
If I can avoid taking one extra bag a month, that’s twelve in a year, right? If you do it too, then we’re up to 24! If you get your best friend to do it, that’ll be 36. (You see where I’m going with this, right?)
If you’re wondering why you should even care about the number of plastic bags, consider the resources that go into creating them, the prevalence of them in landfills, the fact that they pollute when incinerated, and the number of animals that die annually as a result of the bags that end up in their environments.
Find out tons more:
http://www.badlani.com/blog/This is one of those suggestions for Something Good that we can do on an ongoing basis. It’s all about the cumulative effect on this one, baby!
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