HUNTING LITTER INSTEAD OF ANIMALS
"LITTER HUNTING SELFIES"
(THE PLASTIC BAGS EDITION)
A TYPE OF HUNTING WHERE NOBODY HAS TO DIE AND EVERYBODY CAN BENEFIT
CLICK HERE TO SEE HUNDREDS OF BONUS PICTURES FROM THIS PROJECT
Fun Fact: The average plastic shopping bag only weighs 5 grams, so 10,000 of them would weigh a little over 100 pounds!
But please keep in mind that because a plastic bag weighs so little, if it is left outdoors, all it can take is some wind for it to start moving (or even start flying) and there is no telling where it could eventually end up.
Almost all of the bags that I found had a small warning on them stating that they were a choking hazard for young children, but not one of them mentioned the fact that they are also a choking hazard for wildlife and that a lot of these bags end up in the environment each year.
Some of the bags that I found still had a receipt in them, and sometimes it would say that the customer just bought something small like a candy bar, an energy drink, or a pack of cigarettes.
Giving a customer a bag when they are purchasing something that small seems so unnecessary and wasteful to me that it makes me think of when the comedian "Mitch Hedberg" was talking about whenever he's walking down the street and someone hands him a flyer...
"It's kind of like they're saying, 'Here, you throw this away!'"
- Mitch Hedberg
Did you know that so many plastic bags end up on the ground as litter, that if you look at a list of the top 10 most common types of litter, "plastic bags" are actually on the list twice???
According to these top 10 lists, "plastic shopping bags" are one of the 10 most common types of litter, but also on the list are "other plastic bags".
So what exactly are "other plastic bags"?
"Other plastic bags" simply means any bags that aren't "shopping bags" like you see at store check-outs, and to help demonstrate how many "other plastic bags" are ending up as litter on the ground, I went on a hunt for "plastic de-icing salt bags", and I was able to find 100 DIFFERENT VARIETIES of them littered along the highway!
I also re-used all of these bags as "trash bags" to help clean up the highway and to help demonstrate that we don't really "need" to buy plastic trash bags to clean litter because of how much of the litter on the ground is plastic bags.
One of the most shocking things to me about litter, is the amount of litter I find which appears to have never even been used. (Including plastic bags that are unopened and still have products inside them.)
I recently went "fishing", and I was able to catch 100 newspaper bags that were floating in ditches along the road that still had newspapers inside of them!
Ditches lead to creeks, which lead to rivers, which lead to oceans, and there is already so much man-made junk in the ocean that the last thing it needs right now is our "junk mail".
If we're going to take anything out of the waters, let's please make it litter.
More plastic bags are ending up on the ground as litter than most people realize, and this is because a lot of plastic bags aren't really thought of as "plastic bags".
You might not think of a candy bar wrapper as a "plastic bag" even though it technically is, and you might not think of a balloon as a plastic bag, but the dictionary definition of a balloon is...
"A bag made of rubber or plastic that can be inflated with air or gas that is lighter than air, and used for decorative purposes."
Because all of the balloons in this picture are "mylar" balloons, and because "mylar" is a type of plastic, all of the balloons in this picture are technically "plastic bags".
"What goes up, must come down, and there's no telling where a balloon that floats way up into the sky will ultimately fall. (I found most of these balloons in the forest, and I seriously doubt that it's because people are celebrating things like "Mother's Day" or their 8-year-old kid's birthday parties in the woods.)
Balloons are, and always have been harmful to wildlife (the earliest balloons were actually made out of animal bladders) and if we are going to drive any more animals into extinction, let's please make it "balloon animals".
Some people have asked me why I'm holding a weapon in these photos, or why I'm making such a big deal about plastic bags, and my response is that plastic in the environment is a dangerous weapon.
Maybe a piece of plastic needs to be shaped like a weapon for it to start to look menacing to us, but the fact is that plastic in any shape or form is a long-term threat to the environment, so please join me in my efforts to help keep it out of the environment by either picking up litter or by simply saying, "I don't need a bag" the next time you go shopping.
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