Goin' Green

Today, I was the dork supreme of the grocery store.

I brought my own nylon shopping bags and my own cloth vegetable bags.

It's guesstimated that it takes one plastic shopping bag between 500 and 1000 years to decompose in a sealed up landfill (it's a guesstimate because plastic shopping bags haven't been around that long). Non-renewable resourses are used to make and ship the bags all over the country. They are a hazard to animals that accidently eat them. Etcetera, etcetera.

Every week I get about a dozen plastic bags when I go shopping. Sometimes, they even DOUBLE bag things. Then on the weekend, if we go shopping at the mall or something, that's another two or three bags. That's A LOT of bags.

You could use paper, but they use trees to make those.

Sure, recycling the plastic bags could help. I guess another thing you could do would be to reuse the plastic bags that you already have.

But, I thought why even get in on the process at all? If I don't use the plastic shopping bags, then I am not feeding the need to create more.

So, no more plastic shopping bags.

We've got CFL bulbs throughout our house. We recycle just about everything we can. We don't eat beef anymore. We try to buy local produce. Our lawn mower is non-gas, non-electric and non-noisy. As soon as it's available in the U.S., we're probably going to sell both our vehicles and buy a hybrid minivan.

And we have nylon shopping bags.

The upside to all this. We feel good about what we're doing.

I know there are some out there that don't buy the whole global warming thing. Hey, you're entitled to your opinion. If you're not gonna change to stop global warming, change to make the Earth a cleaner, nicer place to live. Less garbage and less pollution can only be good things.

What's the downside to this?

I guess it's becoming an Eco-Nerd.

That's okay. I can take it. It wasn't like I was cool or anything before this.