If you are one of the most successful retailers in an economically rich country then, when you say you are going to become environmentally friendly, that can only really mean one thing: going out of business. Retailers won’t admit that, of course, which is why they insist that “going green” is just a case of lowering their envrionmental impact, but being able to carry on selling loads of unnecessary products to people who have been brainwashed into thinking they need them by the adverts those same retailers keep running in the media.
Marks and Spencer, a very large and very well thought of UK retailer, is doing more than most, admittedly. In January 2007 they launched Plan A, the inference being that there was “no Plan B”. Plan A, according to M&S, is doing everything necessary to protect the planet, because we only have one. Plan A is also about preventing […]
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Probably about 6 months ago my wife got so fed up with the stuffed full plastic bags, that I had collected thousands of bags over the past year or two. I always take them and stuff them in a giant garbage bag whenever we go shopping or where ever. So needless to say I had collected a lot of them over a year or two. I did keep them in the garage so it’s not like I had a room full of them.
But since day one I always had the intention of taking them into the recycling center. It just took me a lot longer than I suspected to get them there.
Anyhow, one day she was finally got fed up and told me to get them the heck outta the garage and take them in. She is in full support of me being a greeno and wanting to recycle everything.
So on that day I did two things. First, I loaded up the trunk of my little Ford Focus. When I say loaded, I mean loaded. It was FULL, front to back, left to right, top to bottom of plastic bags. So maybe that will give you some definition of how many plastic bags I seemed to have accumulated. I then took all those in to the recycling center to be recycled. So that was a really good feeling knowing all that plastic was going to end up being recycled instead of ending up in the landfill.
Second thing I did was went and ordered some re-useable bags that we try and use every time we go out shopping. Unfortunately plastic bags still manage to make their way into our home as we forget to grab them on occasion, but it is at a much slower pace than before.
The thing is, Stephen, not to get too het up about plastic bags. There are FAR more important things to do : like not buying stuff at all ;-)
Recycling makes shopping a less guilty activity – that’s why authorities are so keen on it.
K