About a week and half ago, a Facebook friend posted a plea to all of her friends to start recycling their plastic grocery bags. I suggested that she could sit down with her kids and make their own grocery bags together (as seen here). Another friend of hers mentioned she reused all of her plastic grocery bags as kitchen trash bags.
The next day, this headline caught my eye: "Whale dies from eating more than 80 plastic bags"
Read the full article here
The article really hit home what I was feeling after reading that exchange on social media. I didn't want to school anyone because every journey begins with one step as someone smarter than me once said. I remember years ago when I first started to collect my plastic bags and then delivered them to Whole Foods to be recycled. I felt like I was making progress. The next step was ditching the plastic bags all together and just using reusable bags. The next step was making sure I always had a reusable bag in my purse.
And then the very next step of my evolution, was realizing that I didn't need plastic bags for my kitchen garbage can.
The thought was shocking. My sister mentioned it to me, "Why would you buy something to just throw away?"
But it got me thinking.
I remembered a scene from Truffaut's The 400 Blows in which the protagonist's truly evil parents make him take out the trash in late 50's Paris. For some reason this scene, basically out of every other single scene in the movie, was the one that stuck with me and I thought of from time to time. In late 50's Paris, there were no plastic trash can liners:
Perhaps I didn't need them after all.
And I discovered that I didn't. I was recycling most of what I was buying and composting most of my inedible food scraps. The amount of things that weren't recyclable or compostable had been drastically reduced. Occasionally, I have to walk something out to the dumpster to toss out directly because it isn't compostable. That small stroll is definitely worth it, though, if it helps to keep one less plastic bag out of the stomachs of whales in our oceans.
(Oh, and it saves money, too.)
Thanks for reading!