What can you do?

• Say no to plastic.

• Use alternatives to plastic. . . bring your own bags, cutlery, cups, bottles etc.

For napkins and other paper products not wrapped or shipped in plastic, check out the many companies and refill stores that sell alternatives. Here are a few favorites:

• Who Gives a Crap donates 50% of their profits to clean water and sanitation non-profit groups. https://us.whogivesacrap.org/collections/all

• The Grove Collaborative (https://www.grove.co)

• Reelpaper (https://reelpaper.com/)

Read more about plastic pollution and impacts of plastic bags:

• https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/ocean-trash-525-trillion-pieces-and-counting-big-questions-remain/

• https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/marine-plastic-pollution

• https://www.condorferries.co.uk/plastic-in-the-ocean-statistics

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Since we’ve been publishing our blog, we have received some interesting questions memes, and comments. This meme with Colombo has recently been circulating on Facebook and got us thinking.

One way to answer Columbo’s question is to decide it’s pointless to worry about plastic bags, given all the other plastic in the grocery store and to give up making a difference.  The other way to answer that question is to continue to say NO to the plastic bags AND to keep using alternatives to plastic whenever you can.  You can easily find non-plastic alternatives to the milk – old-fashioned paper cartons (which are compostable too by the way); the napkins – use cloth or order from some of our favorite sites; the salad – make your own; the mustard and the ketchup – buy them in glass jars.  Even small changes add up to big differences in our plastic use.

Why does it matter?

Even if you just say NO to the plastic bags and keep using those other plastic containers, you will make a difference. (Not that we are suggesting you do that!!) Plastic bags make up an extraordinarily high percentage of the plastic waste that ends up in the ocean.  The National Geographic Society estimates that there are more than one trillion plastic bags in the ocean (1,333,333,333,333 plastic bags equals 8 million metric tons of plastic).

An organization in the United Kingdom estimates that more than 1 million plastic bags end up in the trash every minute.  The world uses 500 billion plastic bags a year.  This equals 150 bags per person, that’s kind of crazy! Have you ever noticed that most of the trash on the streets and highways is plastic, and most of that plastic is single-use plastic, and most of that single-use plastic are plastic bags?  If plastic bags are so essential, why do they get thrown away?  When we McSisters say no to plastic bags in the stores, we think we may have just saved a sea turtle or kept microplastics out of our bodies.   

All this plastic keeps harming our environment and our health:  One in three fish caught for human consumption contains plastic.  100% of baby sea turtles have plastic in their stomachs. 

Just think:  If just one in ten people stopped using plastic bags, the difference to the environment would be enormous.  It’s easy to make a difference.