Below is a stack of grocery bags, the kind we use as a disposable resource to get our food from the store into our house. It’s not that big a deal, they are expendable, and their just paper right?
Click on the image above to see what all of our little grocery trips each hour add up to.
(Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number consumed in the US every hour.)
To see more depictions of our consumption check out Chris Jordan’s “An American Self-Portrait”
thats a neat picture.
do you have one for plastic bags? that seems to be the bag of choice these days. when i ask for paper (so i can recycle it), i am usually met with looks of frustration because the bagger has to walk to another location to retrieve a hardly-ever-used stack of paper bags.
i use my backpack sometimes to carry groceries. i really need to do it more. thanks for the encouragement to do so.
The cool thing about moving back to Seattle: people actually ask you if you want to use a bag. My pet peeve about the south was that they always used plastic bags and put like one or two items in each bag, so you end up with 13 plastic bags for three days worth of groceries.
Totally unrelated, and just wanted to let you know…Jason got a sewing machine for Christmas along with sewing lessons so he can make our clothes. Maybe we can even sew some cloth grocery bags!
Jody, I’ll have to find something. I read a crazy article about it and the pollution and trash it’s caused world wide, with neat pictures, but I don’t think I bookmarked it.
Erika,
Sewing your own clothes! That’s sweet! I used to have a link to a place that had fair trade fabric, but I’ll have to look for it again.
Jody,
you asked for it, he delivered:
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7
thanks! what a cool website!!!