Oil

Hate Plastic Shopping Bags?

I do.  It’s almost impossible to escape plastic bags – they’re everywhere.  Try as we might, we still end up with a few plastic shopping bags during the month.

I don’t think I need to explain the necessities of skipping the plastic while shopping – oil, animals, water, pollution – it all factors in.

We take our reusable tote bags with us when we shop, but sometimes we don’t take enough or forget to put them back into the car for the next round of shopping.  We’re getting much better at remembering to take our tote bags into the stores we shop at, however, and so I thought it would be cool to do a little experiment.  For the next thirty days we’ll be keeping track of how many plastic bags we’ve saved from the land fill by using our reusable tote bags to carry home our purchases.  Our tote bags are of varying sizes, so I’ll be taking that into consideration while tallying up my totals.  Some of our totes would be the equivalent to two plastic shopping bags, while the rest carry the same amount as their plastic counterpart.

Feel free to take the 30 Day Plastic Bag Challenge with me.  I’d love to see others participate – who knows how much plastic we can kill!

Here’s a tip:  If you want to participate, but don’t have enough reusable tote bags and don’t want (or can’t afford) to buy new bags, visit your local thrift stores.  You can probably find some great bags for very little money, plus you’re giving your dollars to good a cause.  We buy most of our totes from our local Hospice Thrift Store, and at $0.25 and $0.50 per bag we can afford to stock up.

Got some thoughts on the 30 Day Plastic Bag Challenge?  Feel free to leave a comment, and letting others know about the challenge would be pretty cool too!