Ever since I saw a bird caught in plastic netting on a show, maybe Winged Migration, I have made a point of not buying any produce in bags made of plastic netting, unless I felt a compelling reason. On the rare occasions when I have bought something in them, I have meticulously cut the bags up into teeny tiny shreds—as instructed by something I read somewhere—in the hopes that no bird would get caught in them.
Today, I wanted lemons, and I went to Whole Foods. I could buy 9 organic lemons for $4—if I bought them in a yellow plastic netting bag. Or I could buy them loose for $1 a piece organic or half a dollar a piece non-organic. I bought the bag.
But when I got home and started cutting it up, I noticed the shreds still occasionally had holes that could trap a bird’s leg, and I was still putting plastic into the trash, and then from there, where would it go? Probably into that big toxic plastic continent brewing in the ocean—at least eventually—or in a landfill where it would create toxins for a thousand years or so, and it could do a lot of damage along the way.
Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the lemons in the first place—they weren’t local, and they weren’t sustainably packaged or transported, and I couldn’t really defend it. I like cooking and eating with lemons, but I don’t have to—there are other ways to eat and eat well. Still I had bought them, and here I was stuck with this bag.
What was I going to do with it? Save it for an art project? Maybe a collage of trash? How much stuff like that can I save?
A quick web search, and I found out they are absolutely not recyclable, but they are reusable. They make excellent scrubbers if you’re handy with a crochet needle. Not having a crochet needle or any idea how to use one, but having parsnips, carrots, and potatoes I just bought from the farmers’ market and was preparing for a veggie stew, I started scrubbing.
They do make excellent scrubbers—the best I’ve ever found, in fact, and much better than that nice wooden bristle one from Germany via Williams-Sonoma.
For more info on how to make scrubbers out of plastic netting—or to have someone else do it for you for free—check out http://fatbottombags.com/id15.html.
Yes, my little plastic lemon bag is nothing compared to the hundreds of miles of plastic wrapped around pallets of food shipped to grocery stores every day—and where does all of that go? I doubt they are recycling it or doing anything worthwhile with it—just use it once and throw it somewhere to poison us forever after—but at least mine isn’t choking a bird or literally a drop in the ocean, and now I have a good scrubber.
