In the Bag

I read in the April 2013 edition of Delicious Living magazine that each year, Americans use an average of 600 plastic grocery bags per person.  That startling statistic made me even more determined to take our reusable, cloth grocery bags to the store every week.   A few years ago, when the notion of bringing your own bags was still fairly new in our area, I was already dragging cloth bags with me.  The poor clerks would look at me and offer to place my purchased goods in plastic bags (or sometimes paper, depending on the store).  Despite some resistance, I kept it up until now, clerks don't even bat an eye at the sight of a stack of cloth bags.  In fact, some stores place reusable bags near the check-out for you to consider purchasing, and clerks now applaud the effort to conserve.  It wouldn't be so bad if people recycled their 600 annual plastic bags per person by returning them to the bins at the front of many larger stores, but I see countless plastic bags, inflated by the wind, floating across the landscape.  I can't but think of how little effort it takes to bring reusable bags to the store, how easy it is to wash them and how good it is for our environment not to be littered with plastic bags in every field and along every highway.