Plastic Bags

Earlier tonight, we went for a walk with Autumn. Whenever we go for a walk, we take Lucy. If you take Lucy, you need a poop bag.

These days, there are more than enough bags to go around. It's estimated that 60,000 plastic bags enter the US landscape every 5 minutes. If you ever wondered what 60,000 bags looked like, then wonder no more. It's on the picture above and below. Below, is one part of the picture, magnified (click on it to get a better sense). Keep in mind, this is in 5 minutes.

This morning, as I walked past a line up for Tim Horton's coffee, I wondered this: if you stacked all the paper coffee cups I've ever had in my life, how far would they go placed end on end? Would they make it to the border? Would they get to Niagara Falls? Truthfully, this question involved Math and things I really am not interested, so I am left to wonder. But not about my own personal consumption. As much as possible, we try to take bags to the grocery store to reuse them. Or we don't get one.

Because, and this is really thing, we're leaving a planet to Autumn. At a certain point, perhaps in our lifetime, but most likely in her lifetime, we might look back on 60,000 plastic bags in the Us every 5 minutes and wonder what the hell we were thinking. It's not like there's a shortage of cloth bags in the world. It's not life everyone doesn't have a whack of plastic bags somewhere hanging on their back shelf. It's a little thing, and it might be part of a bigger look at Coffee cups, plastic bags and the hundreds of other things we toss out as trash. So, if Autumn reads this later in life, she should know that mom and dad cared. And we did a little bit.