I might save the world, but my own backyard is quickly going to hell!

I recently spent a weekend at a tiny beach called Kelva where my friends Rumy and Shernaz Shroff have a place on the beach. Delightful hosts. I love being invited. To get there you drive upto a place called Manor on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway and then turn off for Palghar. The road takes you through some ghats (beautiful but you get dizzy with the winding road if you’re not driving) and then takes you onwards to a little village called Kelva which is bang on what used to be a beautiful beach. It’s now littered with plastic bags. A little village, hardly known to anyone, miles from any large population center, but it caters to many local tourists. They come there on Sundays and holidays, busloads of them, and spend a few happy hours on that lovely beach. All of them bring along their own booze and food – in thousands of plastic bags. By Sunday evening the place is a disaster. Read on to see what some friends and I are doing about it.

What a delight to find a like minded soul

Its nice to know that there are like minded folks out there. I just read a weblog from a guy called Josh Dorfman who runs an online lifestyle company called Vivavi.com. He has concerns about the same things that bother me and I’m going to write to him hoping we can work together in some way soon. Be nice to actually syndicate with a whole bunch of like minded business folk. Read his blog. Its at http://vivavi.com/Vivavi_Daily.php

Know why Russians bring their own shopping bags?

Because stores in Russia don't give away free plastic shopping bags, that's why. That's why the Irish government imposed a tax on plastic shopping bags and reduced usage 90%. The folks who run our convoluted world can’t accept that there are simple solutions to seemingly complex problems. With one fell swoop we can stop our earth from being choked at the rate of one million plastic bags being thrown away every minute! What do we have to do? Do we need a heavy think tank to figure this one out? No. Just tax plastic bags, and viola! – we’ll have a nicer world

The propensity for plastic continues

They're cheap, easy and everywhere: As many as a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide a year. But would Americans kick their plastic addiction if they had to pay for them? Alaskans call them "tundra ghosts" and "landfill snowbirds." In China, they're "white pollution." South Africans have sarcastically dubbed them their "national flower." Snagged in treetops in Ireland, they become "witches' knickers." The bags are not just a blight, but are wasteful, kill wildlife, pollute oceans and may be insinuating toxins into the food chain. Purchases are bagged almost reflexively. "When I buy a birthday card, it goes into a plastic bag – I buy one item and it goes into a plastic bag," said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, an environmental group in Sacramento. A Japanese study found that beads of polyethylene plastic can concentrate toxins at up to 1 million times their strength in surrounding sea water. A British study found that ocean invertebrates such as barnacles and jellyfish can eat plastic fragments. That leads Murray to worry that "plastic particles are becoming vehicles for transferring toxins up the food chain." Plastic grocery bags were banned in Galena, Alaska, a village of 850. "Bags blew out of the landfill and into the Yukon River, and there was even some evidence the salmon were eating them," said Cindy Pilot, director of the environmental department of the Louden Tribal Council, Galena's governing body. With a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the council handed out 2,000 free canvas bags and phased out plastics in the town's three stores. To date, nearly 40 other Alaskan villages have followed suit, said Bill Stokes of Palmer, Alaska, who helped formulate many of the bans with the state's Department of Environmental Conservation. Taxation works, as does demonstrating an elegant alternative like an attractive cotton bag. See what we have at www.badlani.com/bags/ - see how attractive and affordable they are too. What's your call on this? Tax 'em or not?

Americans are noticing the harm plastic bags are doing

Time was when we all worried about it, the Irish, the Scots, the South Africans, the Australians, us Indians… but the Americans didn’t. Everyone else’s worrying and all the clean-up action lost meaning because it’s the Americans who consume most of the stuff on earth, and use – and throw away the most plastic bags too. So, seeing this article in Newsday gave me great joy. That’s one thing I love about the Americans. Once they pick up a cause, they run with it with an energy and intensity that no one else on earth can match. If the Americans cotton on to this cause, we’re home free! “We are drowning in plastic bags around here. They obviously reproduce exponentially in the closet at night. Take a look at a typical day in our household. Monday: Pick up a few things at a local farm stand - scallions, lettuce, green beans. That's three plastic bags, but since I have a tote bag I don't need a fourth bag for the other three. "Vanity Fair" arrives in the mail in a plastic casing. My husband comes back from the post office with a ton of mail in a plastic bag. Buy chicken at the supermarket, think about asking for paper but contemplate the chicken juices leaking all over the car, and, whoops, said chicken is in a plastic bag before I get my change. And the morning paper arrived in a plastic bag. Total for the day: seven. Saved: one. And goes the week. Plasticbagitis is an epidemic sweeping the world, and it's happening right here in my home. This is not a good thing. Spend a few minutes on line and you discover that this plastic-bag epidemic is not only totally terrible for the environment, but completely out of control. Thousands of turtles, birds and other marine animals are killed every year because they swallow the darn things, mistaking them for squid and jellyfish.... Sad, when solutions exist. Economical and attractive solutions: See the reusable bags at www.badlani.com/bags/ What do you think? Am I being practical here? Or do you believe that there's another solution? Read the rest of the article here