The Last Dance of the Plastic Shopping Bag
It has been lambasted, blamed, and banned. But somehow it still rises on the wind. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE
BECAUSE I LIVE IN A STATE (COLORADO) WHERE LEGISLATORS ACTUALLY TRY TO ACCOMPLISH THINGS, I personally had the opportunity to kill plastic-bags. My fellow voters agreed—doesn’t everybody hate those sad sacks?—and the statewide ban kicked in on January 1.
Goodbye, and good riddance!
Not long after the vote, a bag landed on a high branch in our neighbor’s towering ash tree, and I realized: Many loathsome things—the designated hitter, your Aunt Mildred’s oyster dressing, Newlywed Game reruns—never actually go away.
My favorite poem by Galway Kinnell invokes “the still un-danced cadence of vanishing.”
So it is with the plastic shopping bag: Banned and loathed, but borne aloft, unvanquished.
“For all the environmental troubles single-use shopping bags cause, the much greater impacts are in what they contain. Reducing the human footprint means addressing fundamentally unsustainable habits of food consumption, such as expecting strawberries in the depths of winter or buying of seafood that are being fished to the brink of extinction.”
– Susan Freinkel, author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.
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I use plastic bags all the time. So do vendors at my fave farmers markets here in the wokest of all woke places…San Francisco. I don’t luv them. I feel a twinge of guilt when I use them. As my primary therapist for all things kitchen, Dr. Peter, what do I do? I’m conflicted. While I await your advice, I’ll be drinking heavily.
I remember watching plastic bags swirl in the plaza of the Twin Towers long ago. It was a lonely sight. I am also delighted to report that the Colorado influence can cross borders, there are no plastic bags thanks to Vail at Park City Mountain shops. Go Colorado!