Saw a Customer at a Local Food

¶ … saw a customer at a local food store 'sporting' a reusable grocery bag. But she was buying some plastic garbage bags. This immediately caused me to wonder: might it not be more efficient to stock biodegradable disposable grocery bags that people could use to transport groceries and then use at home as garbage can liners? Perhaps this might cause the least waste of all. After all, although reusable grocery bags may seem better than simply using plastic, disposable bags and throwing them out, many people reuse the disposable bags rather than purchasing grocery bags (which come with packaging and generate other types of waste, through the process of manufacturing and distributing the products).

Another danger of using recyclable grocery bags is that they may be viewed as a panacea, while they do nothing to contain the tremendous waste that results from the use of almost all packaged products, and the fossil fuels generated from manufacturing and shipping. A person who buys steak and puts it in a reusable green bag still has a large carbon footprint, based upon the environmental costs of raising cattle.

Critics of reusable bags point out that manufacturing such bags also results in a great cost to the environment itself. The bags must also be produced and distributed through fossil fuel-burning mechanisms like factories and trucks. They may be unsanitary as storage containers, given that they accumulate potential toxins that can be transferred to food (Goodnow 2007). Fibers such as cotton and jute also extract a cost from the environment because of how they are grown (Reusable bags, 2008, Green living tips).

But perhaps the best reason to use biodegradable plastic bags rather than reusable bags is human nature -- many people buy cloth shopping bags, and forget them in their car, use non-biodegradable plastic bags within the store, and generate more waste -- the waste from manufacturing the cloth bag, and the waste of the plastic bag. The best solution would be a law that mandated all stores and all companies to only use biodegradable materials, thus 'forcing' all consumers to become a bit greener, regardless of what they purchased.

Q2. Americans are forever in search of new ways to lose weight, and the Blood Type diet promises to help individuals reduce their BMI by prescribing way of eating based on an individual's blood type (A, B, AB, or O). According to the book, Eat right for your blood type, naturopathic doctor Peter D'Adamo, states that different blood types are linked to different anthropological origins. Type O is the oldest type (meat-eating hunter-gatherers); Type As were the first cultivator of the soil (grains), Type Bs were agrarians that cultivated animals to be eaten as livestock and milked to create dairy products.