I was pretty stunned when a friend and co-worker in Mexicali emailed me that Mexico City had just enacted a ban on all plastic bags in grocery stores. Honestly, if someone had asked me, I would have probably insisted that Mexico City would be one of the last places on earth where such a law would be considered, much less put into effect. It is the second city in the western hemisphere to ban the bags. San Francisco passed an ordinance in 2007 giving stores 6 months to 1 year to stop using them in the city. I've been to Mexico City, briefly on a two day business trip and several times in the airport on my way to other points of interest. It's a hectic city and when when viewed largely from taxi-cab windows (see the image to the right taken from a cab on my way to the airport) it is difficult to imagine as a place of urban neighborhoods and influential environmental action. http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/08/19/mexico.plastic.bag.ban/index.htmlEven though Mexico also has a 1 year grace period before they start to crack down on violators who distribute the bags or don't use a biodegradeable alternative, it is impressive that they have the foresight to move ahead of so many other urban centers. Consider some of the facts about plastic bags: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0902_030902_plasticbags_2.html:
- We use 500 billion - 1 trillion of them every year. Before the economic crisis made these kinds of numbers commonplace, it would have been hard to comprehend such a quantity of trash.
- Estimates vary from months to over 400 years for a plastic bag to degrade. If the latter is true, we may all be buried in them before they go away.
- More than 100,000 marine animals and birds die each year because they think the bags are food. Sea turtles, who think the bags are jellyfish, eat them and then die of starvation.
- The bags that end up in landfills actually represent a small percentage of the total number of bags out there. Estimates I found are less than 5%. The truth is that many of the ones that don't end up in the ocean as trash or hanging from trees or blowing around on the freeways to catch on your car's fender are being reused by many of us. And that's not a bad thing. If you haven't yet made the decision to purchase reusable cloth bags, there are other things you can do. Keep a bag of bags in your car to take to the store and reuse. They don't take up much space when you compress them. You could even put some in your purse or your pocket. In that way, you can cut down on the number of new bags that are in circulation. If you do decide to buy your own reusable bags, don't get discouraged at how hard it is to make using them a habit. Remember when you had to learn to always fasten your seat belt after years of never doing it (that is if your old enough to remember that. . .)? Well, like anything new, you just have to practice doing it over and over. You will definitely get to your turn at the grocery counter and have to make a mad dash to your car more than once before you think of them when you first put your foot in the parking lot. But it will happen once you have done it 10 or 12 times. Thinking about the poor turtles like the one in the picture above will make it easier.
