An Irishman with a lovely voice told the story of plastic bags in his homeland this morning on CBC radio. It seems that until recently more than a billion bags a year were used in Ireland, resulting in a nasty blight on the landscape of the Emerald Isle. Now their use has been restricted by law and grocery stores sell cheap reusable bags. There has been a dramatic reduction in the litter strewn through the countryside.
We like to walk the beaches along Lake Ontario and there is so much plastic flotsam washed ashore. It's hard to imagine that it has only been in the past sixty years or so that plastic has been used widely. Now it is everywhere. When Thor Heyerdahl of Kontiki Expedition fame went to sea decades after his first raft adventure in the Pacific he observed that there is now a great deal of garbage in the form of plastic bobbing far from land. Biologists tell us that plastic objects kill thousands of birds and and seals and whales.
Ireland has a population of 4 million. There are now nearly 33 million Canadians using how many billions of plastic bags. For a while in the eighties many of us used alternatives. It could be a Christian choice to say "no thank you" to plastic when we are at the check-out.
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