Grocery Bag Project

Transform the Environment One Person at a Time

Compiled by Michael Rohland, castlelong@yahoo.com

Yes, you can. The opportunity is that you as an individual can not only improve the world but to transform it as well. You can save the lives of 1 Million birds and 100,000 Sea Turtles annually who mistakenly gag on plastic litter mistaking it for food. Furthermore, you can save the Ocean. It is a project worthy of our lives and energy.

The opportunity is that this project brings environmental engagement, enrollment and transformation on an individual basis. An individual who is environmentally engaged is much more likely to be engaged in additional environmental concerns. Did you hear global warming, toxins in our food supply, toxins in the air we breath, toxins in the toys your children play with, and toxins in our food supply? Therefore, the everyday simple grocery bag is access to a full environment transformation on a global scale, in essence, the transformation of life itself.

It is a simple problem of plastic grocery bags. Since at least the early 1990s, trillions of discarded plastic items have converged, held together by swirling currents, to form the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that now covers an area twice the size of the United States and weighs about 100 million tons. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there," said one researcher quoted in a February dispatch in London's The Independent. An oceanographer predicted that the Patch would double in size in just the next decade. A 2006 United Nations office estimated that every square mile of ocean contains, on average, 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. [The Independent (London), 2-5-08]

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex

http://www.theiff.org/reef/reef4.html#

http://boardreader.com/t/Oceans_339551/The_great_pacific_ocean_garbage_patch_4269.html

According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic.

Can we as individuals inconveniently and voluntarily have agreement to bring our own reusable grocery bags to the market instead of using the convenient plastic grocery bags supplied by the supermarket? What a transformation it would bring!!!!

If this project, inspires you then not only let it voluntarily transform your world by recycling plastic grocery bags and by bringing your own reusable cloth, paper or sturdy but long term plastic grocery bags to the market. Additionally, go one step further and share this idea with 3 others, your friends, relatives and associates, i.e. pay it forward. Can you do that? If they become touch, moved and inspired and not only bring their own reusable grocery bags to the market just like you do and in turn share the idea with others we will have reached together as a grass roots effort every household in America within 1 short year. Amazing!!! We really can do it together and we can have it done quickly.

The present impact of the standard plastic grocery bag is as follows:

Plastic bags are:

• Made from petroleum, a nonrenewable resource.
• A serious litter problem since they are lightweight and hard to contain (blow around).
• Non-biodegradable, breaking into smaller particles BUT never fully disappearing.
• Mistaken for food by marine animals (particularly sea turtles).
• One of the most numerous items of litter.
• A major part of waste in our landfills.

"I'm the problem, I'm the solution"

Therefore, I propose the following solutions:

The solutions

• Bring your own cloth bag or the previous paper grocery bag when you go shopping. Many supermarkets sell reusable grocery bags at very low prices.
• Ask for paper bag (holds 5 to 6 times more than a plastic bag).
• Ask your merchant to promote cloth bags (charge for plastic or provide incentives for cloth).
• Encourage development of bags made from natural products such as cornstarch and soy.
• Write your elected officials regarding the hazards of plastic bags.
• Participate in a community/beach cleanup.
• Drop off plastic grocery bags at your local grocery store, if you cannot recycle them through your curbside program. Most grocery stores will accept plastic bags and have recycling bins inside the store.
• Share this issue, the impact and the solutions with those that you know, family, friends and work associates and pass this information on to them. Be a leader spearheading awareness of this issue within your sphere of influence and in very little time we can reach the whole country with this message. If you just share this with 3 other households who haven’t been transformed by it and they in turn follow these solutions and they in turn share it then in less than one year we will have mathematically covered every household in the United States with this and if that can be done what else is possible for wholesale transformation? with it. You can thereby transform the whole world.
  
• Ask not what the country, political leaders and somebody else can do to impact this issue but ask what you can do to impact the environment.