Published: May 18, 2008 12:44 am            

DRINKWALTER: What to do about the plastic quandary?

I know I’ve lamented before about the excessive amounts of plastic bags used by the stores. It’s great to see so many businesses are now offering reusable cloth bags. Stores in Europe jumped on the bandwagon and now charge people for the use of the plastic bags.

Once the snow melted, a winters worth of trash littered the landscape across Snyder Drive behind Tops and Wal-Mart. Most of the trash that had clung to the trees and bushes was plastic cups and bags. (That must be quite a task to pick up that mess.)

Sure the plastic bags have their place, picking up puppy poop for one. But it seems as if, try as I may, I still have a huge collection of those pesky bags that end up in the garbage. I try to remember to bring my reusable bags into the grocery stores to squelch the ever-growing collection, and when I don’t, I ask for paper because I always recycle paper bags. It’s exasperating to ask for paper and end up having the paper bag of groceries put into plastic bags anyway. Is there a contest to see how many plastic bags each cashier can use in a shift? We’re often sent out of the stores with our merchandise in five or six plastic bags when two or three paper or cloth bags would suffice.

Snyder Drive seems to collect the most obvious concentration, but a few months ago I read that over 140 tons of debris has to be removed per year from the Erie Canal. That’s quite an undertaking. I wonder how much of the debris is plastic bags.

In an effort to do my part to recycle, I keep reusing plastic water bottles several times. Then we find out that not only should we worry about the water we are drinking, but also about the plastic bottles we are drinking it out of.

Now there’s the scare citing that water bottles, baby bottles and sippy cups made with Bisphenaol A or BPA are harmful, especially for babies. Canada banned BPA in baby bottles last month and Wal-Mart is following suit. Apparently the debate over BPA has been going on for decades.

On the Internet I read: “The U.S. government’s National Toxicology Program said this week that there is ‘some concern’ about BPA from experiments on rats that linked the chemical to changes in behavior and the brain, early puberty and possibly precancerous changes in the prostate and breast. While such animal studies only provide ‘limited evidence’ of risk, the draft report said a possible effect on humans ‘cannot be dismissed.’”

I also read that the No. 1 on the bottom of plastic bottles supposedly means they are safe. No. 3, 6 or 7 mean it’s potentially unsafe. Some bottles with the No. 7 indicate that the bottle contains Bisphenol A.

Chemical makers maintain that Bisphenol A is safe. They say a person would have to consume 1,300 pounds of canned and bottled foods each day to notice any effects from the chemicals those products contain. So who knows?

Remember the e-mail scare that went around warning us not to use plastic wrap to cover food that we warm up in the microwave or we could get cancer? I have been covering dishes of food I plan to microwave with microwave safe glass plates instead of plastic wrap since I read that.

But when it’s all said and done, is the media scare worth the worry? Enough already! The results of testing may not be seen for a long time. In the meantime, I will probably keep reusing plastic bottles, but I still believe we should cut back on the use of plastic grocery bags because like so many things, less is more.

Deb Drinkwalter is a Lockport resident. Her column appears every Sunday. Send comments to d.drinkwalter@yahoo.com.

        

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