By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
It’s the ugly sign of spring – the flimsy plastic bags blowing on trees and bushes.
“I bet if you looked out your window wherever you are, you would inevitably see a bag in a tree,” said Wood County Administrator Andrew Kalmar.
But we Americans like our plastic bags. It’s estimated we use 6 billion a year to carry home our groceries and other items. Though some are reused to line wastebaskets and pick up after pets, the vast majority are thrown out.
During a visit to the Wood County Landfill, the county commissioners noticed the screens around the landfill caked with plastic bags.
“It was incredible. There were bags in every tree, in every bush,” Kalmar said.
So the commissioners asked the Wood County Solid Waste District to help the region clean up its act. And that has led Amanda Gamby, environmental educator with the county, to start a campaign called “Got Your Bags?”
“We’re finding them in pretty large quantities when we go out to pickup,” Gamby said of the plastic bags.
“It’s a horrible litter problem,” Kalmar said. “Everybody uses them, but we have to do better.”
So local residents are being asked to either take their own reusable bags to stores, or bring their used plastic bags back to the stores to be recycled. If recycled, the plastic can have a new life as composite lumber, pallets, containers, crates or pipes.
In talking to local residents, Gamby has found that they don’t object to bringing reusable bags to the grocery store – it just hasn’t become part of their routines.
“It’s not that they don’t want to use the bags, they forget them,” she said.
So Gamby has been handing out “Got Your Bags?” decals to put on car windshields to remind shoppers to either take their reusable bags or return their used plastic bags since most stores have bins to recycle them. Most local stores also sell the reusable bags at the registers for very cheap prices.
Gamby suggested that shoppers could also make a difference by asking that some items not be bagged. “You can say, ‘don’t put my milk in a bag.’” And local stores will be approached about having baggers put more items in each bag.
BGMS student Nina Zhu’s winning design for billboard.
As another reminder, the solid waste district just held a billboard art contest. The winning student’s art will be asking motorists along Ohio 25 north of Bowling Green if they’ve “Got Your Bags?”
On Wednesday, Gamby had a table set up at the Bowling Green State University Eco Fair. She wasn’t the only one asking people to reduce use of plastic bags. Nick Hennessy, campus sustainability director, was actually wearing a suit made of 500 plastic bags.
Matthew Cunningham, a BGSU senior, said a trash audit on campus revealed how much is thrown away at the university. Approximately 2,000 plastic bags are handed out from dining services and the bookstore each day, he said.
A simple step was enacted earlier this year asking cashiers on campus to not automatically put purchases in plastic bags. That step saved 18,750 plastic bags from being landfilled in the last two months, Cunningham said.
“These are things you use for any hour, then last for a century,” in landfills, he said. “Those are ending up in our waterways. Every little thing counts.”
