Mending Our World — #3 — Marilyn Lamoreux Photography

Happy Monday friends. Today I’m going to talk just a bit about plastic bags.

Mending Our World — #3

Plastic bags are ubiquitous in modern life. Though I continue to work on reducing my use of plastic bags, today I’d like to talk about re-using plastic bags instead of throwing them away immediately after a single use.

Industrial pollution and the discarding of plastic waste must be tackled for the sake of all life in the ocean. – David Attenborough

When I was a kid my mom never bought plastic bags. We used waxed paper to wrap our sandwiches for school lunches. My mom washed out the bread bags and reused them again and again until the print began to disappear from the bags. Instead of using plastic wrap to protect a batch of brownies or a cake, she covered them with a folded tea towel. Though the food would eventually dry out if left long enough, sweets never lasted that long at our house.

I do try to wash and re-use a few plastic bags. You can find plastic bag drying racks online if you want to try this. But I’m working harder on not using the bags at all.

We save our used plastic bags and re-use them whenever I scoop the cat’s litter box.

Plastic Use is a Modern Habit

We didn’t always use plastic bags in stores and shops. I remember when the only kind of bags available at stores were paper bags. When I was 20 years old I went to the island of Cyprus to live with a Greek family there for 3 months. The amazing innovation I discovered there that I had not seen before was (you guessed it) plastic shopping bags.

Only we humans make waste that nature can’t digest. – Charles Moore, oceanographer

Gosh, I thought those bags were handy. I used and re-used them for toting things around, storing my current embroidery project, and more. What a wonderful innovation, I thought. Little did I know how much of a problem this would become for our world. Shortly after that trip, plastic bags began showing up in American stores as well.

And now, well, plastic is everywhere. You can buy disposable plastic bags and containers at every grocery store.

Though I cannot eliminate all plastic in my life I can work on reducing my use. We now use re-usable cloth bags for our grocery shopping and I’m trying to remember to bring them to other stores as well when I shop.

And I’ve begun using re-use glass jars for storage and re-purposed wide-mouth canning jars for storage as well. They work great for me.

This year I began a project of photographing plastic that I find when I take walks in wild places. It has helped me to notice how much plastic is lying around polluting our world. It is dis-heartening to see just how much of it I find.