With the advent of the BiC lighter, Americans saw big changes in habits as convenience became more and more prevailant. My mom (rip) used to say "this whole nation is turning into a throw away society".… That was likely around, 1975?
Ok, how about some grocery bag history?
Seems at one point folks took their own cloth sack to the market to obtain their supply of food goods. We call them groceries now because so many things are prepared in one fashion or another. Fresh milk, eggs, cheese etc. But back then most items were in a raw state or bagged in their own container like sugar. That wasn't very sterile so as things became more industrialized and more people flocked to cities, germs from grocery sacks made lots of people ill. Society insisted on better.
Enter the paper bag. Oh it was heaven at first. "Please double bag the milk this time grocery boy". Every cool kid in America had customized book covers for their school books made of grocery bag paper. There were all kinds of uses for them. But "save the trees" meant thin little plastic bags replaced the ever popular paper bag. At first it sucked.
Only 1/3 capacity those little bags tore easily and were a pain to get rid of. Big ball of poofy plastic packed your kitchen trash can where the paper bags were neatly folded and stored for use as something else later. But like self service gas pumps, we got used to plastic bags. Heck in my home they line trash cans, wrap Christmas ornaments upon putting them away, or use as portable luggage.
Well then we heard "save the fish" and slowly communities rallied against plastic grocery bags, some even banning them in local stores. Many of those folks have gone to using cloth sacks for their organically grown staples and have begun to learn the hard way that……
Cloth bags carry germs so now in those comunities they cry out for…… wait for it……
Paper grocery bags. But stores charge a nickel apiece for smaller, thinner paper bags so frustrated consumers are overheard saying "ya know those plastic bags were ok afterall"....
Shown here is a project Mrs Fixer is making for a friend.
A change purse made of plastic grocery bags. She calls it "plarn" where she folds the bags into a strip, cuts the strip into smaller segments, unfolds the smaller segments and ties those end to end and creates a ball of plarn. The plarn is croche'd into items such as celphone covers, flashlight holsters, fanypacks, ladies pocket books or as you see to the right, BiC lighter cases……
Here's a door wreath made of worn out t-shirt materials.
We do our part to reduce what goes in trash cans and recycle buckets. Now part of my thinking is that the large, heavy truck drives down my street made of thin asphalt every week all slamming on breaks at each house and wearing out the pavement structure. As the truck gets loaded it gets heavier too. So each week we do a little to preserve the pavement. Also neighbors cluster cans and bins together so the trucks stop less times, workers get more time riding on the back in a summer breeze and less fuel is used from accelarating house to house. We all try to do a little.
Yard waste is composted into fertilizer, house down spouts water flower beds instead of running to the street and ends up being dumped into streams in large quantities, which in turns scours away stream banks. Things like that mean we still live with modern day conveniences but leave a little less impact on the planet later. While posh neighborhoods have some corparations trucks spraying salt laiden liquids on their super lawns we sprinkle 50/50 mixtures of leaves and grass clippings that mother nature turns into topsoil and actually does better at feeding the roots and providing weedless lawns. Nutrients don't end up in ponds creating algae layers so the fish get bigger for ending up on somebodies dinner plate later……
Yup. A little here, a little there.