Plastic shopping bags are controversial. Now, a couple of decades ago this is a sentence one wouldn’t have imagined typing or reading, but today, the issue of plastic shopping bags is one which raises a lot of hackles. One of the major issues is that when disposed of, plastic bags take centuries to decompose. Even when they do decompose, they release toxins into the soil and water where they lie, and more often they will present a choking hazard to marine life. This is all the more […]

If you had said half a century ago that one of the greatest threats to our environment over the next century would come from plastic bags, you would have been laughed at and told to stop smoking whatever it was you were smoking. Yet these days, people are coming to that conclusion. It is a little known fact that, even in a country which often uses paper bags where others use plastic, Americans throw away a startling 100 billion plastic bags every year. Of those, estimates as […]

Although there is a compelling amount of evidence that most of what the environmental scientists have been telling us for years is true, there is no shortage of skepticism around the major environmental issues facing us. There are plenty of people who have made their refusal to recycle into a political stance. Not only do they not wish to recycle, they wish to pull the rug from under anyone who does. They argue that it actually takes more energy to recycle than it does to dispose of […]