When the grocery checkout employee asks me if I prefer paper or plastic,
I pause. Plastic bags serve my miscellaneous household trash needs, but paper
is required for serious garbage.
“Do you offer Gucci leather bags as a third choice?”
The clerks always respond with a polite smile, “No. You’ll have to supply
your own.”
Shoppers in America
rarely bring their own bags, unlike the practice in Europe .
While in Paris with a tour group, I
purchased a loaf of bread and some wine in a local grocery store. The check out
clerk grudgingly put my things in a paper sack, all the while scolding me in
French. I think he said, “Go quickly from my sight, you environmentally
insensitive American.”
If you mention “Carbon footprint” at a cocktail party, you run the risk
of starting a war. In one corner stand all the “greenies,” shouting across the
room at those who are not. The “Save the Planet” folks would love to put
plastic bags over the heads of those who continue to use them, convinced they
are harmful to mankind. Plastic bags are difficult to recycle. But so are many
other waste products of our civilization.
During my working career, I had occasion to help dispose of rubber tires.
It is costly to collect and send them to approved storage sites. Should they
catch fire, they burn forever, polluting the atmosphere big time. Some used
tires are cut up and mixed with asphalt to provide a better highway pavement
material, but the supply far exceeds the demand. I once saw an innovative experimental
home in a small Mexican village that had been constructed of used tires held in
place by adobe plaster. It resembled an igloo and had about the same appeal. I
don't think Americans would enjoy living in one.
There is no market for the gigantic amount of ash that coal-fired power
plants produce each year. One use would be to dump it on tires should they
catch fire. Of course, we could avoid the issue by simply burning used rubber
tires instead of coal to produce steam at generating stations. Sadly, the
economics don't make that viable.
The world struggles to find a solution to the problem of disposing of
industrial waste. All our undertakings lead to the creation of environmentally
unfriendly waste. We accept the realization that mankind produces harmful waste
for which we have no use.
Technological progress makes perfectly useful things obsolete. Take for
example my two Keuffle & Esser Log-Log duplex slide rules. I used one while
studying and working as a mechanical engineer. When my job became that of an
administrator, it went into dead storage. A second slide rule came my way years
later, long after I had retired, a gift from the widow of a former VP of Chevy
engineer. It sleeps with the first one in a file cabinet. Computers supplanted them.
Even though the French thought ill of me for not carrying my own shopping
bag to the grocery store, I admire them. After all, Americans chose to adopt
their easy to understand metric system for our monetary system. In contrast,
the English monetary system boggled the mind.
I conclude that Parisians love our money, but not our indifference to
their ecological sensitivities.
It’s a worrisome thing to have no suitable bag in which to pack up one’s waste,
troubles or food supplies, merci beaucoup. .
▀
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