For most of us, the environment is very precious. It is important to keep it clean and green. There are just as many things that are bad for our earth as things that are good. For example, when we let our plastic grocery bags drift through the air and land wherever they please, there are birds who do not know better and will mistake the pieces of plastic as food, and will attempt to eat it. Sometimes, it will even end up in the ocean and become waste. Then the fish will eat it, and they will choke. This is why using cloth bags is a better solution. If you do not own any cloth bags, the solution is easy. When we go shopping, we can ask the cashier for a cloth bag or two. Sometimes they will charge us, but the price will be very small. For years, people have tried to stress the importance of keeping our environment clean and safe. Helen Schifter, a former arbitrage trader on Wall Street, is a prime example. She encourages us to try and keep the environment our top priority.
Plastic bags are sometimes biodegradable, but even then, they take a very long time to degrade. In fact, it will take a plastic bag approximately five hundred years to degrade in a landfill. Isn’t that horrible? That’s way longer than the plastic bag is actually in use (an average of twelve minutes). The reason they take so long to degrade is because the plastic starts out as fossil fuels, which is how they end up in the ocean in the first place. The worst thing is this: many retail chain stores use almost nothing but plastic bags when they are helping their customers check out. Also, in America, people take home over one thousand, five hundred plastic bags per year.
However, America is not the only country at fault. In China, shoppers bring home over three billion bags a day. When people started using plastic bags to carry their groceries, everybody saw them as fool proof. We began reusing them for many things, like small trash can liners, baggies for poop-scooping, even storage for many of our small household items. If you take a look around a lot of homes, you will discover that many of us even have plastic bags of plastic bags shoved in our kitchen cabinets, our wardrobes, even our bathrooms. This proves that they do not come in very much use. This was, of course, before we learned that the material was having a scary impact on our animal friends.
In conclusion, please try not to use plastic bags while out grocery shopping if you can help it. You can even bring your own reusable cloth to most grocery stores. Another interesting thing about the cloth bags is that you can purchase them with cute designs on them if you like! In fact, sometimes people have the materials to make them! So please, recycle your cloth bags. Please visit elle decor for more information on Helen Schifter.