As a man, I’ve decided to keep some sort of handbag with me at all times. I’m not feminizing myself, and I don’t want to call it being green, because that term sounds too eco-cute.
I just want to be able to buy a pack of gum or cotton swabs without creating a permanent record of the transaction in the form of a plastic bag that will last thousands of years.
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Purse-toting women already are equipped to carry many of the things they buy. Men, who tend to travel light, have no such option, so with every purchase comes one more plastic bag that eventually will land in or near my front yard.
I know it can be a struggle to refuse these bags.
Case in point: Beer tastes better right after work than any other time of the day, so I often grab a bottle near Union Station for my Metra ride home. But as I pay for the beer, a clerk typically will plunge it into a paper bag, then start to put that bag into a plastic bag, unless I intercede.
I realize that regulations on package liquor sales are strict, but I don’t think we have to mummify the thing.
And it doesn’t stop there. Even when I buy a single item, I practically have to leap on the thing like a spooked Secret Service agent to keep it from being put into a bag. Unless it’s something embarrassing, like treatment for worms, I don’t need to hide it in a bag, and if I do, now I’ll just put it in my handbag.
I raise this issue now because of a stunning revelation about plastic, especially bags, that emerged with spring warmth. While I was driving in Wisconsin — beautiful Wisconsin — along U.S. Highway 12 just north of the Illinois border a couple of weeks ago, I saw plastic grocery and shopping bags and simple sheets of plastic everywhere — stuck in the grass, snagged on trees and wedged into fences, like there had been a plastic-heaving parade over the winter.
I’d never seen anything like it in Wisconsin. Then I started looking elsewhere along my daily paths, and I’ve got news for you. Those little bags are everywhere.
The real eye-opener was the Grayslake landfill along Metra’s Milwaukee District North Line: When the wind kicked up, plastic bags lodged in numerous nearby trees, looking like huge cotton balls ready for picking.
I think we get so accustomed to seeing them that they become invisible. Fortunately, those wonderful people who adopt portions of highway to keep clean have been deployed in spots.
But now I see the problem, and I’m trying to clean up my own slime trail.
You’ll pardon me for mentioning this almost two weeks after Earth Day, which seems unnecessarily segregated to one spot on the calendar.
Maybe we should expand it to a week, a month, a year. Or simply declare a Non-Earth Day, when you’re free to litter, pollute — live it up. Then the other 364 days, worry — and worry hard.
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