Food for tote: Say yes to reusable bags

They’re quite hot and haute, those canvas or reusable bags you see some very practical people toting to the supermarket, to work or just about anywhere. Easily the most popular is British bag guru Anya Hindmarch’s much-copied, must-have canvas tote that declares, “I’m not a plastic bag.” When it was first released, the rather pricey bag sold like hotcakes for $15 and fetched a prohibitive $200 to $400 on Ebay.

Last Christmas, we received some eco-friendly canvas bags — including, yes, Anya Hindmarch‘s eco-chic bag, which fellow staffer Therese Jamora-Garceau got for each one of us girls when she went to Hong Kong. How very toteful of Therese! A friend of mine has been looking for this now much-coveted Anya tote but has had no luck. Therese says it can be ordered online.

Well, if you don’t have an Anya, there are a lot of just-as-nice and environment-friendly canvas bags in stores like Cinderella’s and supermarkets like Rustan’s Fresh, Shopwise, and SM Supermarket or in  all-natural health products stores like Healthy Options. Don’t forget to bring one with you next time you do your grocery shopping.

The whole truth is that Whole Foods, an all-natural supermarket chain in the US, is planning to stop using plastic grocery bags and will instead be offering only recycled paper or reusable bags, according to the New York Times.

Whole Foods adds a whole new dimension to grocery shopping by making it more fun. Think having fresh salad of your choice made and enjoying it with a glass of chardonnay in the middle of your shopping chore. Or dipping a fresh strawberry in a flowing chocolate fountain. Or choosing from any of a hundred seafood items and having it cooked for eating on the spot. Or even getting a therapeutic massage to relax frayed shopping muscles.

Whole Foods previously tried to get customers to use reusable bags, but this did not catch on until it started offering these eco-friendly bags for 99 cents. Whole Foods officials estimate that the supermarket chain, which has outlets across the US, currently distributes 150 million plastic bags a year. These plastic bags are simply thrown away after one use, and as they are not biodegradable or do not break down easily in the environment, they end up filling landfills and floating into tree and rooftops, roadways, and oceans.

It’s easy to see why we should say no to plastic. According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, “Plastic pollution causes more than one million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and even more fish to die in the North Pacific alone every year.”

Then he starts literally talking garbage: “The problem is so bad that a plastic ‘stew,’ twice the size of Texas, has formed on the Pacific Ocean. Scientists have dubbed the mass of floating plastic trash the ‘Eastern Garbage Patch,’ and its volume is growing at an alarming pace. Even more shocking: When researchers tested the water of the Pacific Ocean, they found it contained six times as much plastic as plankton, by weight! It’s not just marine animals that are poisoned by all these stray plastic bags.  You, too (and your breast-fed baby), are ingesting plastics every day through the food chain. It’s a hazardous mix of chemicals and additives, such as: cancer-causing PFOAs; PBDEs, which cause reproductive problems; phthalates, another group of reproductive toxins; BPA, which disrupts the endocrine system by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. The end result of breathing, eating, drinking, and absorbing all of this plastic includes obesity, declining fertility rates and other reproductive problems, and cancer, just to name a few.”

Dr. Mercola cites some sobering statistics for us to absorb, such as:

• Annually, between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags are consumed — that’s more than one million bags per minute.

• US consumers use more than 380 billion plastic bags annually.

• Taiwan consumes about 20 billion bags a year, or 900 per person annually.

• Australians consume 6.9 billion plastic bags each year, or 326 per person.

• Ireland consumes about 1.2 billion plastic bags, or 316 per person.

Of these billions of plastic bags:

• Only one to seven percent is recycled.

• It takes 1,000 years for polyethylene bags to break down.

• During those 1,000 years of photodegradation, toxic substances leach into the soil and enter the food chain.

And here’s a bagful of info from the BBC: Did you know that windblown plastic bags are so prevalent in Africa that cottage industry groups are now harvesting about 30,000 bags each per month and using them to weave bags and hats? And did you know that today, plastic bag litter is practically everywhere that it can now be found as far north as Spitsbergen (78º North Latitude) and as far south as the Falklands (51º South Latitude)?

Nuff said. It’s as clear as daylight why we should be down-to-earth and say yes to reusable bags.

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Hello! Can’t sleep? Read this

Hello there, all ye cell phone users! Here’s a message from BBC News: A study suggests that using a cell phone before going to bed can cause insomnia, headaches, and confusion. It can also cut your amount of deep sleep, thus interfering with your body’s ability to refresh or rejuvenate itself.

In this study, 35 men and 36 women were exposed to radiation equivalent to that received when using a cell phone or given sham exposure as an experimental control.  So, what happened? Those who were actually exposed to radiation took longer to enter the deeper stages of sleep  (when your heart rate and respiration speed up) and spent less time in the deepest one (when you start dreaming because of intense brain activity).

Says researcher Prof. Bengt Arnetz, “The study strongly suggests that mobile phone use is associated with specific changes in the areas of the brain responsible for activating and coordinating the stress system. The radiation may also disrupt the production of the hormone melatonin, which controls the body’s internal rhythms.”

But some people who sleep with their cell phones have a hard time getting enough zzzs and eventually turn insomniac for reasons other than what’s cited above. Would you believe you can actually get a text at 5:45 a.m. from someone, whose name is not in your directory, asking for pasa-load?

Message sent.

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