The 54th annual Earth Day is Monday, April 22nd and this month’s issue of Remnants Magazine is dedicated to the planet Earth. We will explore innovative technologies in fashion, ways to conserve while gardening, as well as fun ways to observe Earth Day this year.
Earth Day started in 1970 and evolved into “the largest civic event on Earth” according to earthday.org. This year’s theme is Planet vs. Plastics. The focus is on rapidly ending all single use plastics and fast fashion, and to increase support of the UN Treaty on Plastic Pollution by way of collective actions.
In case you missed the April Fools Day gag from the organization, they redesigned the website for part of the day with a message that stated that they were ending Earth Day and focusing on Mars Day because the Earth could not be saved and Mars has not yet been polluted.
They have since made it clear that it was a joke but it did cause me to pause and think hard about how we ALL need to really care and take individual actions to stop the use of plastics.
This is incredibly hard to do because the big businesses and governments say they care or are taking actions when in fact, they are not. Think about how many of us were given a hard deadline to start bringing our own shopping bags to stores only to continue to purchase items that are almost all wrapped in plastic. Most of that plastic is not even recyclable – like clamshell packaging! We did our part but they still have not.
Many cities like mine have legislation that states only certain types of businesses can no longer provide plastic bags or straws while the big businesses are not included in that group. A store like Walmart could make a huge difference if they stopped providing plastic bags. Anyone who shops at Walmart knows that not only are the plastic bags they provide such poor quality that you are forced to only use them once but they are so thin that they are doubled and sometimes tripled by the checkout person who only puts a few items in each bag. The end result is you coming home with about 50 plastic bags that already have rips and holes so you can’t even reuse them to pick up your dog’s poop on a walk.
Imagine what a difference it would make if Walmart alone stopped using plastic bags and also demanded that the product suppliers use sustainable packaging in order to be sold in their 4,615 US locations (5,402 International not including Sam’s Clubs).
We should not stop the fight against plastics but time is running out for us. We’ve got to put our individual political dramas aside and work together against these bigger entities and DEMAND CHANGE THAT WILL BENEFIT ALL OF US together.
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