Kara
Washington, DC
"Paper or plastic?" is a difficult question that I prefer to avoid. I use two trusty tote bags to do my grocery shopping when I plan a trip, but if I walk in a store to pick up something quickly, I often don't have them on hand. So I walk out carrying whatever I can't stuff in my purse under my arm, and only accept bags as a last resort.
Partly, I like to keep the collection of bags under my sink to a minimum. Partly, I have an aversion to plastic bags thanks to a watershed cleanup I participated in earlier this year.
One horrible rainy morning in April, the Alice Ferguson Foundation coordinated an area-wide Potomac watershed cleanup. One of the meetup sites was practically in my backyard, so while the weather was miserable, I figured I'd go out for a short bit and do my part. Motivated by park rangers' stories of wild finds in years past, the cleanup took on some of the glamour of a scavenger hunt. While the boy scout troop took off upstream, my cleanup buddy and I headed downstream, pockets full of blue and black trash bags - the blue for recyclables, the black for trash. I was briefly excited over a nerf football, slightly less excited about a waterlogged cache of undergarments, but 90% of my finds were plastic bottles and plastic bags. Not much to write home about.
But the plastic bags were menaces. Wound tightly up in branches, leaves, and mud, I fought to free these pink, blue, and yellow bits of abomination. And some bags are photodegradable (over a period of time), which had the effect of making them brittle, so mere tugging wasn't always effective - it sometimes took careful manipulation to collect this brand of trash.
Still, I couldn't imagine how SO many bags had ended up wrapped around those twigs. There couldn't be that many people picnicking and leaving trash lying around, and I've never seen anyone toss a plastic bag out of a car window while driving down Rock Creek Parkway. I'm sure there are some, but not enough to account for all of those bags and bottles. According to the park rangers, most of the trash we found had washed down storm drains. Plastic bags and other litter lie around in the street until the next storm washes them out of sight and straight into Rock Creek.
So I figure there are two parts to my earthecho story: 1) I finally saw exactly how any trash lying on the street will end up in our creeks, rivers, and eventually the ocean. 2) I really hate plastic bags. Totes, on the other hand, are sturdier and hold about three times the capacity of a plastic bag. I love totes.