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thedrifter
09-28-08, 06:58 AM
Commentary: Lieutenant Vows to Sacrifice Convenience for Green Lifestyle

9/26/2008 By 1st Lt. Patrick Boyce , Marine Corps Base Quantico

MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va. — — In both my personal and professional military life I have always considered myself a fairly laid-back guy.; however, there is one item in particular that I take as seriously as a heart attack, and it never fails to make me click off safe when I see others demonstrate the lack thereof; namely being environmentally conscious.

This pet crusade of mine has mostly been to the amusement of others (hence the ‘‘Lt. Recycle” nickname). They either joke about some imagined retribution of mine should they not show proper deference to my green demands, or completely dismiss my concerns offhand, finding it nearly impossible to fight the effects of gravity and get up off their butt and walk the five feet to properly dispose of their waste in the recycling bin.

Yes, there is much that vexes the mind of Lt. Boyce, but while I momentarily have this soapbox, I’ll concentrate fires on one evil that I see as diabolically infesting our society, wrapping around every facet of our day-to-day lives like the tentacles of an abhorrent octopus; plastic bags.

The seemingly harmless plastic bag, an omnipresent hallmark of our disposable consumer culture, is in fact a devastating environmental blight, that, strange as it sounds, degrades the overall quality of life for every living being on earth, and yes, that includes you.

Think about how many plastic bags you go through in a day. Whether it’s picking up the groceries, a prescription, a book, just about any consumer item you can think of, chances are if you’re buying it, it’s going in a plastic bag and I’ll bet dollars to donuts once you’ve lugged whatever you got back to your home you’ll never use that plastic bag again.

According to the Web site environmental-activism.suite101.com, America throws out about 100 billion plastic bags a year. Already there are untold trillions of plastic bags just taking up space in the world, and because they’re made from petroleum they’ll only begin break down in a distant future neither you nor I will see. Looking at something so light and wispy you’d hardly think that trillions of these bags would be a problem, until you consider there’s a vortex-like cesspool of trash, mostly composed of plastic bag fragments, that’s twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean. It’s like something out of a bad science-fiction movie (‘‘The Plastic Blob from Beneath the Sea!”). It’s because of their tendency to escape the confines of landfills and become air-born (remember that stupid blowing bag in ‘‘American Beauty”?), often ending up as sea litter, that plastic bags are annually responsible for the deaths of a million sea birds and an estimated half-million sea mammals and sea turtles that make the fatal mistake of eating the very item you were using to bring home the milk last week.

A common misperception in recent decades is that the environmentally savvy consumer should chose plastic over paper at the supermarket to save some trees from the pulp saw. The problem with this myth is that (with proper management) trees are a renewable resource, while plastic bags, because they are a petroleum product, are not. Like paper bags though, plastic bags are in fact recyclable, although only one percent of them are recycled. Some retail stores will actually take back your plastic bags back once you’ve used them. However, these plastic bags are often recycled into other plastic products that cannot be recycled, so it’s best not to use them at all.

I guess we might be less careless about chucking plastic bags in the trash if we realized our yearly waste of them is the equivalent of dumping out 12 million barrels of oil, according to the Web site salon.com.

Already, many nations around the world have begun campaigns to eradicate the plastic infestation and curb consumer reliance on it. Some nations, such as Bangladesh, which faces major flooding problems due to clogged waterways often aggravated by plastic bags, have banned them outright. Most of Europe, Israel and even China have begun to tax or require payment for the use of plastic bags, dropping their use in some locales by as much as 90 percent, again according to salon.com. Similar changes may soon be coming to a store near you, as already the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., have eliminated plastic bags from supermarkets. Seattle and Los Angeles are scheduled to follow suite within the next couple of years.

Until these initial bans become far-reaching laws, there is much that both you and I can do to wean ourselves off plastic bags. The solution is as simple as not using them. When you purchase an item at whatever commercial outlet, simply inform the cashier you do not require a bag if you can easily carry the item(s). Now most supermarkets offer reusable canvas bags for retail — many of them for less than a dollar. Reusable bags are for sale here at the base commissary’s Customer Service desk. Often though you can’t help but accumulate some plastic bags; these can be recycled or returned at the place where you got them, such as Wal-Mart, or you can find other uses for them, such as trash-container liners.

One might think it unimportant to raise such a stink over what appears to be a few measly bags you may have picked up from CVS, but the degree of fossil fuel waste, the danger to wildlife and overall environment degradation is no laughing matter. The consequences may be dire, but the solution is a relatively simple one. Although they have become so ingrained in the operations of our daily lives, divorcing ourselves from the use (or overuse) of plastic bags is a relatively painless process if one takes a moment to think and reflect on the impact of their actions.

Okay, Lt. Recycle has said his piece, time to step off the soap-box, but to paraphrase my previously mentioned speech, go out there and ‘‘(expletive deleted) recycle and reuse!”

Ellie