one percent non-solution

I often wonder how much energy it takes to make a bag that I may use for 10 minutes. Let's say I go to the drug store, get shampoo, vitamins and make-up and check out. The cashier puts that stuff in a bag. I drive home - 2 miles - take the stuff out of the bag and then throw the bag away. That return trip, with the brand new bag, took about 7 minutes. So, this bag that took oodles of resources and energy to make and get to me, went from treasure to trash in 10 minutes.

Okay, so let's say it don't throw it away, but recycle it. I put it in my "bag of bags" and take it to Giant next time I go, and put it in their bag receptacle. Now, there is a difference of opinion as to where this Bag-of-Bags goes. Some folks - including workers at Giant - say it is thrown in with the trash. But even assuming it gets recycled, I am still not so happy.

After all, there are, we are told, five [linear] stages of merchandising and consuming: extraction (getting the materials out of the earth), manufacturing (making the resources into the stuff we use), merchandising (selling it to us), consuming (using it) and disposal (getting rid of it somehow). In between, by the way, is all the transportation and trucking and shipping and driving that moves the stuff from place to place.

Recycling only affects the first and last. Manufacturing, merchandising, consuming and transportation remain. Which is why we say the first step in limiting pollution and waste is Reducing what we use. So even if all the plastic bags were biodegradable, we should still make it a habit of shopping with cloth, reusable bags.

But there is more. I just watched a piece on the lifecycle of stuff - you can see it at http://www.storyofstuff.com/

There is an astonishing, horrifying, piece of information there: Guess how much of the stuff that is made today will still be in use six months from now. The number is horrifying: 1%.

Now, even if she - the narrator of the Story of Stuff - is off by a factor of ten, and even if "in use" is a big vague as a category, it is still an astonishing figure. But think about it: all the food we eat, and the packaging it comes in. The candy, the tchotchkes we buy, the paper and ink and pens and napkins; the cups and covers and other disposables we use at McDonalds and Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. The batteries, the cleaners, the oil. The newspapers, cardboard boxes and styrofoam peanuts. So much more than I can even imagine right now.

And it points to a great truth. We use more stuff than we need to. Imagine if all that money we spent on stuff went to fair wage salaries and rebuilding our nation's infrastructure. (I have written of this before so I will spare you now.)

We focus so much on recycling, and that is not bad. But we also need to focus on the other two "R's": reducing and reusing.

Maybe that should be our next big push. The world seems to have begun with reducing (or banning) plastic bags and water bottles. Let's keep the momentum going!