Have Cloth Shopping Bag, Will Travel

My favorite reusable bags - update on http://plasticless.com on Twitpic
The reusable shopping bags that I received from wrapsacks two years ago are still going strong. Not only have they been under constant use for shopping, they have also served as beach bags and even travel bags. I always have our cloth shopping bags stored in a zippered outside pocket on our luggage when we are traveling. Reducing plastic waste can be very challenging when moving from one place to another.

During the last two years I have also used other reusable shopping bags. Some of them wore out prematurely because of bad design. Some of them were used to contain items that we were giving to friends or donating to charity. Others were simply left in our rented homes when we moved on.

The most common problem with all the inferior shopping bags was handle failure. A shopping gab without handles is next to useless. The two wrapsack bags that we have had since 2009 have handle material that goes all the way to the bottom of the bag.

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  • Do You Pick Up Litter When You’re a Tourist?

    I’ve just finished reading a fascinating account of some personal direct action from a Canadian who is living and working in Morocco. Robbin Yager provides Tours and Treks in Morocco. One day she decided to roll up her sleeves and start clearing plastic trash out of some of the dry riverbeds in that country.

    Here is a summary from her page on direct action:

    Over the 10 years I’ve been living and working in Morocco, I’ve seen plastic grow from a few bags blowing across the Sahara, to clogged rivers and watersheds everywhere, from a few bags left by roadsides to huge dumps into ravines and gorges. In developing countries where information is not readily available to citizens, it can take governments a long time to develop solutions for problems. I believe people learn and are encouraged by example. Tourism is very important in Morocco. As a tourist anyone can make the problem seen and heard most easily by taking direct action. And I have to add, it feels so very good to pick up that first bag!

    I have never undertaken any trash cleanups as ambitious as hers. When I was in Tunisia, I would walk for a few kilometers on the beach and pick up as much as I could carry. I always worried about where this trash went after I placed it in the dumpsters. Recycling in that region was pretty much limited to those few items that were profitable such as corrugated paper and plastic beverage containers. I was once confronted by a guard as I approached the fence of a beach resort while picking up garbage. I didn’t have the command of the language that it would take to make a nuanced response when I was asked what I was doing. This was a tense and awkward moment and it was discouraging.

    When I first moved to Malta five years ago, I spent the first month living in a cheap apartment on the outskirts of a resort area. There was a lot of litter. Whenever I was putting our recyclables and garbage on the curb, I would always spend some time adding to our allotment from the stuff that was lying around outside. One day, a British expat across the street was laughing at me and telling me how futile it was to pick up trash. I think his words were ‘You’ll never get t all.”

    I will never get it all but I still make a point of getting some of it. I am not a strong swimmer, so when the rest of the family is snorkeling in the deep I dive around in the shallows picking up ice cream cups and coke bottles and plastic bags and bendy straws. When I have gathered an armload of trash, I usually have to walk to a receptacle that is conveniently located next to businesses that cater to tourists. The big sunglasses that are in vogue prevent me from accurately gauging the looks that I get from these tourists. I have never had anyone join me.

    Littering is one a a handful of social and environmental issues that I keep my nose out of when I am a guest in a foreign country. I do keep up with the local news and I quietly cheer on any local people who are speaking up about those issues. Tunisia has an official mascot for environmentalism. It is a cartoonish looking fennec fox that is often mistaken as a mouse by tourists. Malta finally has a real tax on plastic bags. Tourists sometime grumble and pay the Euro 0.25 per bag. Locals use reusable bags or sometimes cardboard boxes.

    I think spending some time picking up litter while you are on vacation is a great idea. If you want to plan a vacation around cleaning up plastic trash, Hawaii sounds like the perfect place.

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  • Looking to the Past

    I am not going to ramble on too much about finding ideas for the future by looking at the tools and techniques used in the past. Just keep your eyes and your mind open to old ideas.

    I didn’t come away from my tour of an vintage machine shop with any new ideas. at least not this time. Some old ideas that I have covered on this blog in the past include washboards and unsliced bread.

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  • 99 Bottles of Water…

    I was back on Gozo last week. It was great to be back there. I think I will always consider it to be one of my favorite places to live. Unfortunately, visiting involved drinking water out of plastic bottles :(

    The summer heat resulted in my family drinking a lot of water. I didn’t count the bottles, there were a few in the rented flat when we arrived and the flattened bottles filled two large paper shopping bags when we tidied up at the end of our stay.

    The tap water there is distastefully high in sodium. If I was a local green activist, I wouldn’t ask them to improve on this, since the water comes from a diesel powered desalination plant. It removes enough salt to meet the standard for safe drinking water.

    When we were living on Gozo, we opted for a purified water delivery service that used refillable 20 liter jugs. Homeowners on Gozo often choose to install inline filtration systems to provide drinking water. Neither of those options are practical for a one week vacation.

    I wrote about my setbacks and victories related to drinking water back in February. When I am visiting places in the future I think I will spend some time searching for accommodations that have some kind of water filtration. I have stayed at a hostel in Florence that had a drinking water dispenser. I’m not a big fan a posh hotels and I suspect that they wouldn’t go that route as it would cut into their sales of $5.95 plastic bottles of water. Beth Terry recently blogged about her switch from a hotel to a hostel after BlogHer, she is a very entertaining writer.

    Proximity is important in my travel decisions for economic and ecological reasons. If I lived near a selection of destinations with tasty tap water, this problem would be solved.

    A travel filter is another possible solution. There was no way that I was entrusting my Brita to the baggage handlers on my recent trip.

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