When she moved to the United States from Germany seven years ago, Angela Neigl brought with her the energy-conscious sensibilities of life in Europe. You drove small cars. You recycled every can, lid and stray bit of household waste. You brought your own reusable bags or crate to the market rather than adding to the billions of plastic bags clogging landfills, killing aquatic creatures on the bottoms of oceans and lakes, and blowing in the wind.
But, alas, there she was Friday morning, lugging her white plastic bags from the Turco’s supermarket, like everyone else, figuring there was no fighting the American way of waste.
You could have learned a lot, I guess, about the politics of global warming from the lukewarm response President Bush received last week from skeptical delegates at his conference on climate change and energy security. But in the most micro of ways, you can learn plenty any day of the week at the Turco’s or the Food Emporium in Yorktown Heights, the Super Stop & Shop in North White Plains, the A.&P. or Mrs. Green’s Natural Market in Mount Kisco or just about anywhere Americans shop in Westchester County and beyond.
And the lesson for now pretty much seems to be that no matter how piddly the effort, no matter how small the bother, well, it’s too much bother.
“I know,” said Vicki Strebel, another Turco’s shopper, when asked about bringing a reusable bag rather than taking home the throwaway plastic. “I should, but I don’t. I’m sorry. I’m too busy. Things are too crazy. If I got the bags, I’d probably forget to put them in the car.”
Plastic bags are not the biggest single issue out there, and no expert on global warming would suggest solutions rest wholly with decisions made by individual consumers. On the other hand, it is estimated that the United States goes through 100 billion plastic bags a year, which take an estimated 12 million barrels of oil to produce and last almost forever. And if individual decisions can’t solve the problem, the wrong ones can certainly compound it.
The New York Times
