What can I do if I hoard more and more plastic bags?

In the small kitchen, two common non-woven shopping bags are stacked on the floor in the corner, which are bulging with various white plastic bags, sometimes in a few different colors. Walking into such a kitchen and seeing a place occupied by a pile of "white foam", you will have a judgment that this place may belong to an old woman who lives frugally, and of course it may be an old man who adheres to the same attitude towards life. However, the owner of this kitchen is only in his early middle age.

I don't want to label my unconscious behavior as an "environmentalist," but it doesn't seem wrong to sublimate it. A simple family of three, doing something seemingly incredible in today's city life – never ordering a single takeout. This way of life is without any prior planning or obsession to achieve a certain goal.

Some people say that takeaway produces a lot of garbage, which is not good for environmental protection, but how many people are paying attention to and practicing environmental protection without takeaway? The reality is that I have hoarded a lot of plastic bags in my kitchen, and the original intention is to delay them slightly from becoming "disposable" items and "white garbage". As the plastic bags piled up, I began to confront them head-on, and even became disgusted, why are there so many plastic bags? I just live a normal and simple life, what can I do? I can only continue to hoard in the corner. Not at all!

Go into the supermarket to buy groceries, two tomatoes in a bag, three cucumbers in a bag, a few potatoes in a bag, a handful of shallots in a bag, almost a variety of a bag, if you are worried that you are not enough to trap two, even roll bags or other bags are like free paper in public toilets. Sometimes, I deliberately put two or three varieties in a slightly larger bag and carry them to the weighing table, and the outspoken salesperson directly told me to separate them next time. It may affect the work efficiency, you have to take out each dish and weigh it separately, stick the barcode on a bag, and then put it in the same way after weighing. When I encountered a long queue in the back, the disdainful eyes were on my face one by one, and I was embarrassed, remember to do less in the future. When I arrived at the cashier, according to the policy, some plastic bags could not be free, but how many people cared about the three or five cents? Not to mention, it didn't cost anything to roll out a few more free large even roll bags in the commodity area.

If you buy vegetables in a traditional vegetable market, you don't even care about customers collecting money for plastic bags. In most small supermarkets where husband and wife stalls live, they simply do not have the confidence and courage to ask customers to collect money for plastic bags, and it is difficult to do business, and the faces of customers are thinner than plastic bags. Otherwise, the next time the old customer passes by in front of your door with a plastic bag in the store next door, thinking as he walks, how much can a bag be worth?

For a while, two machines were set up in front of a local supermarket that I frequented, which could scan the code and automatically pick up biodegradable plastic bags. The operating procedure (or price) is to scan the QR code provided by the machine with a mobile phone, pay attention to an official account, and then click "out of the bag", a plastic bag will be spit out from the machine, and each person can receive up to five a day, but the official account that needs to be clicked is not the same each time, which means that the operation must be repeated five times.

As a middle-aged person who is proficient in handling a mobile phone, it takes about a minute to pick up a bag, and those who hold a smartphone in their hands may take even longer and often need the help of a supermarket clerk. Moreover, some people spit out a bag after the machine, pull and cut off the bag when the operation is improper, or think that the bag can be pulled infinitely like a free roll bag, and it is easy to get stuck in the machine, so the salesman needs to open the machine with a key and toss it.

Out of novelty, I have operated the machine to receive a few bags, these biodegradable plastic bags, the feel is slightly heavier than the same size of traditional plastic bags, smooth and delicate soft, there will be no such rattling sound, the weight is not much of a problem, but it seems to be more likely to be punctured by sharp things.

Not long after, even the small supermarket downstairs added a similar machine. The official account that the scanning machine pays attention to,Most of them are about life、Emotional content,It looks non-toxic and harmless,But it doesn't seem to have much value.,I almost always take it after I get it.,Typical unloading and killing donkeys。 I don't know if there are too many people like me, or there are other aspects of resistance and difficulties, these machines that provide degradable plastic bags for free did not last long and disappeared. Plastic bags, which are more environmentally friendly, will make a comeback next time?

People often refer to the city as a reinforced concrete forest, and human beings are far away from the real forest and enter the urban forest established by new materials, in fact, it is more about happiness, but occasionally adds a little nostalgia for nature. Nowadays, another young material, plastic, is almost 200 years old, is the life that wraps your life all the time, from head to toe clothes and shoes, from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room, into the car and train plane, from the shopping mall to the scenic spot, from the city to the countryside, you can no longer delete the plastic from your life, or you can only travel back to the primeval forest.

A small plastic bag started to make me a little anxious, and the real human troubles may have started to synchronize from the moment plastic was born. Medical researchers have detected microplastic particles of various sizes in human blood, heart, stomach, lungs and even the placenta, which are difficult to metabolize and absorb by the human body, and accumulate in the human body if they are not excreted. Whether "microplastics" pose a significant risk to human health is still a huge unknown, and relevant scientific research is urgently needed. Environmental scientists and geologists have discovered "plastic rocks" in nature, and these plastics are combined with rocks in the form of chemical bonds rather than physical interactions, which means that artificial plastic products have entered the geological record of nature, and perhaps, archaeologists in the future will explore a new geological species - plastic fossils - as people found dinosaur fossils today. From the Arctic to the South Pole, from the Mariana Trench to Mount Everest, traces of microplastics continue to be found. Birds, turtles, whales, finless porpoises, and beasts of prey are constantly losing their lives.

On April 22, another Earth Day is coming, and this year's theme happens to be "Global War Plastic". I was afraid that one day I would sit in front of the doctor, and the diagnosis would say "plastic syndrome", and the doctor would spread his hands, shake his head and sigh: there is nothing we can do!

(The author is a freelancer in Jingmen, Hubei)

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Editor-in-charge: Wen Cuiling