I recently visited California, which banned plastic bags this year. I visited four markets. I saw not one dead body from the ban; not one person suffering and wailing in anguish from the ban. What I saw instead were people calmly bringing bags from home, buying paper bags for a dime, or simply carrying items in their arms.
What I also “saw” were no plastic bags being made from fossil fuels, being thrown into trash cans, blowing around streets, gumming up recycling machines, ending up in forests, waterways and oceans, choking turtles and strangling birds, and disintegrating into toxins making their way into the food chain.
We don’t need plastic bags, don’t need plastic straws, don’t need plastic drinking cups, don’t need plastic eating utensils, don’t need plastic-bottled water (except maybe during natural disasters). Single-use plastic things are stupid. We should refuse them, every chance we get.
And we certainly don’t need the world’s largest methanol facility in Kalama, sending methanol to China and getting back more single-use plastic junk that we do not need. OK, Evergreen State: let’s meet California’s challenge, and go further. Earth is our only home. Only fools mess up their homes.
