Valley Green Tips: Dreaming of oceans blue

As much as I love Echo Lake and the Saco River, I recently escaped for a day to the Maine coast to cool my feet in the Atlantic Ocean. For a few moments, I enjoyed child-like fun as I searched the incoming tide water for starfish, shells and other treasures I might find. Sadly, I also found some trash, and plastic debris — not too much as it was almost high tide — but enough to remind me to bring my reusable bags with me when I go shopping.

Plastic bags are a source of plastic pollution in our oceans. Most plastic bags can't be recycled, and those that are, unlike aluminum, can only can be recycled once or twice. Then, they are landfilled or blow away to become entangled in trees or around animals necks, or find their way into drains and sewage, and then make their way to the ocean. Plastic bags have been found floating north of the Arctic Circle and as far south as the Falkland Islands, according to the British Antarctic Survey cited by CNN.com/Technology.

Plastic bags don't biodegrade. They photodegrade, breaking down into smaller, more toxic petro-polymers that contaminate waters and lands. Some studies indicate that in some places in the ocean plastic polymers (resulting from a variety of plastics, not just bags) are more numerous than plankton. Animals ingest polymers mistaking them for plankton and it can kill them; their bodies decompose and the polymers are left behind to be ingested by other animals to possibly kill them, or work their way up the food chain. Equally troublesome, particles congregate in the oceans trapped in currents and are building into ugly plastic islands in the sea.

According to a National Geographic News report released in 2007, which cited data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency, somewhere between 500 billion and one trillion plastics bags are being consumed worldwide each year.

For many environmental and aesthetic reasons and even because plastics are made out of oil by-products fostering greater oil dependency, many countries have banned the use of plastic bags. While not banned in the United States excepting a few places like San Francisco, we can help reduce plastic bag use here by adopting the reusable bag habit.

The Mount Washington Valley Green Team encourages everyone to kick the plastic bag habit and pack your groceries in reusable cloth bags whenever you go shopping. The use and reuse of just one cloth grocery bag can eliminate the need for 1,000 plastic bags over just five years. If 10 percent of Valley residents adopt the cloth bag habit, together we can keep 1 million plastic bags out of the waste stream over the next five years.

Thanks to the stores that remind us with a sign at the entrance if we remembered to bring our reusable shopping bags.

Valley Green Tips is brought to you by the Mount Washington Valley Green Team, a non-profit group dedicated to greening the Valley through programs including Valley Community Gardens, education, recycling programs, and Family Funergy events. For more information and other Valley Green Tips, visit mtwashingtonvalley.org and search for Mount Washington Valley Green Team.