Leaving behind a paper - and plastic - trail lasting 1,000 years

To the editor: The article in your Feb. 15 issue of The Warwick Advertiser entitled “Part of something greater than ourselves” inspired me to suggest this follow up. The N.Y. Times reported on Jan. 23, 2008, that the Whole Foods grocery chain will stop offering plastic grocery bags. Until now they estimate distributing 150 million plastic bags a year. A rising number of governments and retailers are banning plastic bags because of their environmental impact. Typically they are thrown away after one use, do not break down easily in the environment, fill landfills, float into trees, roadways and oceans. Some sobering statistics from mercola.com: Plastic pollution causes more than 1 million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals and more fish to die in the North Pacific alone, every year. The problem is so bad that a plastic “stew” twice the size of Texas has formed on the Pacific Ocean. Scientists have dubbed the mass of floating plastic trash the “Eastern Garbage Patch” and its volume is growing at an alarming rate. (Part of that “stew” will also be the equally huge problem of all the empty plastic water bottles worldwide.) Even more shocking: when researchers tested the water of the Pacific Ocean they found it contained six times as much plastic as plankton by weight. Between 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide annually. Only 1-7 percent are recycled. It takes 1,000 years for polyethylene bags to break down. Paper bags are not an attractive solution: Producing a paper bag requires four times the energy to produce than a plastic bag. In 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans that year. The answer: Use reusable cloth shopping bags. As Michelle Desveaux pointed out in her article of Feb 15, it is “never easy to change our habits” but change them we should and change them we must. Cindy Krikava Warwick