There is a floating island of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas. The plastic bag you get from the grocery store will be around longer than your grandchildren. Attempts to create bio-plastic from corn that will degrade more rapidly and eliminate the use of petro-products are not making progress, in part because they cost more and are not as durable- sort of the point I guess. The hope is that product packaging will incorporate these bio-degradable materials because that excessive packing goes directly into landfills without reuse. This won’t happen unless consumers demand the change because of cost.

I am very uncomfortable buying anything made of or packaged in plastic products. The only exceptions might be very high quality items, preferably made of recycled materials, that I am reasonably sure will still be desirable and functional for the foreseeable future. One of the changes I’ve made in the last year is to examine my purchases from a long term perspective. Do I really need this? Can I find an alternative that has less packaging? Can I find it used? Are there versions that are not indestructible?

Perhaps the worst offenders are food products packaged in plastic containers. Metal cans and glass bottles are totally recyclable yet more and more food products are being packed in plastic, much of which is not recycled. The solution to this is fairly easy: Buy canned or bottled products when you really need something ready made. Learn to cook and use fresh ingredients that don’t need packaging. In my local grocery I can get meat packed in aseptic plastic packaging or meat wrapped in paper by the butcher, not a hard choice. The aseptically packaged food may last much longer but the packaging itself trumps that- it will around for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

We should think about what our grandchildren will wonder about when they think about the choices we made. What were we thinking when we wasted precious resources to make plastic bags, bubble packaging, dollar store tschotkes, etc, etc.? Why did we leave these mountainous piles of plastic outside of every city and town? How dumb was that?

It doesn’t mean that just because we may not be around to answer those questions that we don’t have to. We have to ask ourselves, every time we buy something: ‘what is the long term effect of this choice?’. And we have to justify to ourselves the same way we would if our children were demanding the same answers from us.

Apparently, according to Scientific American.

Once you’ve built the plant you don’t need to refuel it. Ever. And there are zero emissions. And they run 24 hours a day forever (no storage problem). And they can’t blow up or leak dangerous radiation.

So what are we waiting for?

From Tom Friedman:

“We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …

We can’t do this anymore.”

I can either commute via the expressway or by taking a four lane road (East Ave) that makes its way through mostly residential neighborhoods into the downtown area where I live. It wouldn’t be a bad bike route except the fact that it has four lanes means a cyclist forces traffic in their lane to move into the left lane to pass the bike.

There is no reason to have four lanes on this road. If we took one lane and split it to make a bike lane on each side and then created a center turning lane we’d lose no driving convenience whatsoever. This would essentially only involve restriping the road to the new configuration.

Our city is criss-crossed with these four lane, 35mph arteries. A county-wide plan to create bike lanes would help change a lot of perceptions about bike commutes. We could even use them as scooter lanes for low-powered scooters with a low speed limit (20mph?).

With our winters I know there are skeptics about bike commuting. However those winters are getting shorter and fall and spring are great cycling weather periods. Competition with cars is a major factor when considering a commute. Dedicated lanes would help. They would also keep people riding on the correct side of the road (with the traffic). Riding against traffic or on sidewalks is a major safety issue because drivers don’t expect anything there.