1st NY Plastic Bag Ban!!

Knowing I wasn't the least bit concerned with all the buzz about the royal wedding, one of my friends shared this recent news with me while waiting to pick up our sons from school last Friday: Southampton Village in eastern Long Island passed a plastic bag ban! Now, that's so much more newsworthy in my opinion! Here are all the details in the Southampton Patch online coverage. This is such a positive step into a more sustainable, responsible future and I sincerely hope other towns, villages and cities nationwide will seek to adopt the same legislation, despite the false protests and "plastic advocates" like those who fought this Southampton Village bill in vain. I especially love the sentiment that this is not a paper vs. plastics debate, but rather a "bring-your-own-bag" mandate. Mark my words, I am NOT one to believe in over-legislation, but we are grossly behind other parts of the world in our environmental laws, and plastic bag bans are LONG OVERDUE. The sting of inconvenience and forced changed might hurt a little at first, but incorporating reusable bags into daily life is just like any other habit. Congrats to the people of Southampton!! Hopefully Long Beach will follow suit.


For more plastic bag info and to learn more about the related documentary Bag It, click here.

What Ryder would do if he ran the world....

Last night at dinner, my little boy asked me what I would do to end pollution if I was in charge of the world. What a great question! I started in on my long list of missions including alternative energy, corporate responsibility, recycling laws, etc, but then my internal mothering voice prodded me to turn the question back on him. I guess my bagless quest has rubbed off, because his first answer was that he would ban plastic bags. Glowing, I asked him why he thought that was important. He said he doesn't want to see them in our ocean or stuck in tree branches anymore. Great question, great answer.

So we decided, in our sticky booth at the West End Pizzeria, to make a single-use plastic bag ban our mother-son mission, starting in our small oceanside city of Long Beach. Just because the most environmentally progressive state of California failed to legislate such a ban last year (for more details on this setback and why plastic bags are so awful, click here), we're not deterred from taking our best shot at a local effort. There's a pop song on the radio right now by Katy Perry in which the opening line refers to feeling like a plastic bag drifting in the breeze. Sadly, this is a common image and pretty much any listener can relate to the symbolism. In Dylan's era, it was the answers that were blowing in the wind, not toxic waste. So if I really were in charge of the world, plastic bags would be gone and Dylan would be back on the radio. We walked out of the pizzeria with a new mission and without a plastic bag for our leftovers.

Stay tuned for updates as we take our bagless mission to community level.