Recycling is Sexy
Recycling is sexy. Those of you who know me at all understand just how hot I think it is when I see someone tossing their empty Odwalla bottle in the right bin. You know the way I drool when someone has a reusable coffee cup. And you know how I feel about boys in tee shirts with the recycling symbol on them. Those three little arrows, following each other around in a circle, holding onto each others tails and looking so pleasantly involved in their ongoing cycle…
In fact, there is something hot about all forms of environmental consciousness. Someone buying a head of organic lettuce is automatically super fresh. Someone who rides a bike can really rattle my chain and get my wheels turning. A boy with a Buy Fresh Buy Local sticker on that bike…now there’s someone who can stick around. Enough with these bad/amazingly hilarious puns.
Now this all might stem from the fact that I come from Santa Cruz, California and have parents who tend to worm boxes and attend farmer’s markets. Or maybe I just love scruffy facial hair. Either way, someone who cares about their personal impact on this planet is alright with me.
Here’s something that’s NOT sexy. PLASTIC BAGS. Number one biggest turn off: a dude buying one solitary steak (not to mention, he’s eating alone) that is prepackaged in one of those depressing Styrofoam boats with the plastic stretched too tightly over it and the picture of the cartoon cow, laughing, glued to the plastic…and then the grocer hands him a PLASTIC BAG! And the boy with the solitary steak TAKES THE PLASTIC BAG! And the boy with the solitary steak DOESN’T EVEN THINK TWICE! Oh goodness, I think when I see this. This is not a marketable market boy.
You see, plastic is made of polyethylene (polyethylene=not sexy) which takes up to 1,000 years to decompose at the dump (dump=not sexy). Americans (not sexy) use 380 billion bags a year and only recycle .6% of them (.6 percent of anything=not sexy). Plastic bags are usually used for only 15 minutes (anything that lasts only 15 minutes=not sexy) before they are thrown into the trash or littered onto the street (litter=not sexy). Then they harm sea life (suffocated squid=not sexy) and strangle seagulls (dead seagulls=not sexy); there was even one sea creature, dissected by some darling Dutchmen, who had ingested 1,603 pieces of plastic in his short sea life: NOT SEXY!
Plastic bags, as I am proving to you, have NO SEX APPEAL.
People all over the world are starting to see what a turn off plastic bags can be. Australia (and you KNOW how hot Aussies are) are selling “green bags” at most stores (color-coded for each store) to discourage plastic bag use. Most European countries charge for plastic bags at markets, pushing people to BYOB (Bring Your Own Backpack). In Bhutan, king Jigme Singye Wangchuck has banned plastic bags completely (along with MTV and tobacco) on grounds that they lower the Gross National Happiness of the country (he made up this term and it is pretty awesome). And we all know about San Francisco’s infamous blow off of the plastic bag this last year…
This is all well and good. But Americans (not sexy) are still (alongside Europe) using and wasting over 80 percent of the world’s plastic bags. (We apparently do not get sex appeal memos until a few years too late. I mean we JUST figured out that mullets were back like, a year ago.) So how do we, the twenty-somethings of the Green-Is-The-New-Black era do to fight off the red flag that is the plastic bag? How do we change our ways to look SEXY AT THE SUPERMARKET?!
I’ll tell you what to do: use a reusable shopping bag. Use a BAGGU reusable shopping bag. Why? Because not only do I work for Baggu (I swear they did not pay me to write this) and use them every day myself, but I personally find them to be the sexiest of all shopping bags on the market. They are made of ripstop nylon. They come in radical colors. They fold up into a tiny pouch. They get you dates.
www.baggubag.com
