Here's a bag on e-Bay that looks like the one I used to carry around, except that mine was pink and the size of a Volkswagon. It should be possible to use the same technique used to create the "boho" nightmare I used to have to make a permanent shopping bag out of plastic carrier bags. Cut bags into strips, twist the strips together into a long rope, coil the rope and use monofilament to stitch it into a roughly tote-shaped item. Then braid up some shoulder straps out of the same noisome material. A bag like this would be ugly, but not significantly uglier than plastic carrier bags are in their original state, and we none of us feel self conscious dragging those around. More importantly a bag like this has the potential to turn the act of shopping from a guilt-inducing drag to a positive experience, almost a balm for the soul. Not only would the shopper not be adding plastic to the garbage gyres, those Texas-sized masses of plastic out in the ocean that kill a million birds and "about 100,000 seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, other marine mammals and sea turtles" every year; but the shopper would be, at least for a time, removing plastic from uncontrolled sea landfills. Even if in, say, forty or fifty years our shopper shuffles off this mortal coil and her beloved bag made from bags somehow fails to sell at her estate sale and gets thrown away, and even if it escapes the garbage truck and ends up in the street, from whence it washes into a storm drain and thence into a creek that flows into a river that washes it out to sea, even in this worst-case scenario, if a sea turtle were to come across 100 carrier bags bound into the shape of an 80s-era shoulder bag, the turtle would hardly try to eat the item. Such a tote would be far too retroboho hippyfabulous to resemble a jellyfish, and in any case it would be too big to fit into a turtle's mouth. He or she would paddle gently away.
Blipskrieg
What the world is doing with plastic bags:
this
that
the other
not to mention
THIS!
and finally,
This is the cutest thing I ever saw in my entire life OMG what if there was a Hello Kitty one!
PS: Don't forget to stay out of the grocery store.
2 comments:
Here's a quote from that second story:
"It moves around like a big animal without a leash," said Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer in Seattle and leading expert on currents and marine debris. "When it gets close to an island, the garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic."
This is the thing you were telling me about months and months ago! How truly scary.
I love those blips! Especially the ones where they spell "fiber" "fibre." I blogged the Mozambique Technology Museum and put it in a draft so that I could back to it later. I think we need to let up a links section for our favorite websites.
The Samina Plastic bag is so amazing, but I have to know how they "fuse" layers of plastic bags together.
Oh definitely, and I completely saw Hello Kitty's face made out of that stuff. I can't believe it's made from recycled plastic -- it looks so coordinated.
Fuse! I must fuse! How do we find out how to fuse plastics? Would a certain mad scientist know???
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