January 11, 2008

If China can Ban Plastic Bags, We Can Too

This week China banned the use of plastic bags. This gives the world a giant head start at sacking the environment damagers, as the people of China reportedly uses 3 BILLION plastic bags a day.

Since our children most likely accompany us on all of our purchasing ventures, let's get them adjusted to shopping with reusable bags at a young age. Let's start a whole new generation of shoppers who carry their own totes for life. Imagine how many plastic bags we could avoid using!

I went searching for reusable bags to recommend, and it was important to me that they were made from organic cotton, which equates to sustainable, environmentally friendly farming practices. Otherwise, we'll just have a whole different set of issues once we swap plastic for cotton...

Blue Lotus is a company that not only uses organic cotton in the making of their bags, they also donate a portion of sales to the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. This project seeks to eliminate longline fishing, which is a severe threat to sea turtles. Additionally, thousands of sea turtles, whales, seals, seagulls and many other ocean dwellers die each year due to the consumption of or suffocation by plastic bags that are dumped onto beaches and into oceans.

So scoop up some cute reusable bags from Blue Lotus, or find some you like of your own accord... but maybe one of your New Year's affirmations could be saying goodbye to the plastic bag forever.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's good, they need to do something over there. They just did a study and our air is starting to suffer because China's filthy air is starting to blow over. They have the largest number of coal mining plants in the world and they are unfiltered. And Brian can attest taht the air is terrible over there and many of their people have cancer. So, it is good to hear that they are trying to be environmentally friendly with something.