This past week has been busy! All energy and effort is being directed towards installing our garden. We’ve had a lucky stretch of mostly dry weather here in the Northwest, which has allowed me and husband to work outside every waking moment. We’ve made some great progress and I promise to share with you some before and ofter shots.
Yesterday we ran into a bit of an unexpected issue – a buried “treasure” of plastic goods tossed who knows how long ago. While it’s a bit hard to tell from the picture, what you are looking at is a foam chair pad, a red Solo Cup (lower right corner), an old tupperware, a paint brush handle (under action hero) a golf ball, a fake plastic fern – which I found the most ironic – and my favorite, a “Power Ranger” action figure in perfectly working order.
If you don’t remember who or what the Power Rangers are, you must not have been born in the 80’s or had kids then. In the early 90’s the Power Rangers were all the craze in the child toy world. They were also criticized for exposing children to violence (which I think could also be said about looney toons – and I LOVED looney toons). Regardless, we’ll clean him up and see if he can be made into a workable toy for some child.
What you don’t clearly see is all the plastic bag pieces in the pile. By far the most pain in the a** plastic to deal with, I spent hours trying to pick out the little, itty, bitty plastic bag bits buried in the soil. If you pulled to hard, the plastic shredded into even smaller bits – so I felt like an archaeologist as I gently tried to coax the bags from their buried tomb.
Finding what a pain it is to deal with plastic bag trash validates my efforts to bring not only my own totes, but produce bags and bulk containers too. If I had to choose the most insidious plastic – I would say plastic bags hands down. They are produced to be thrown away and easily migrate from garbage cans and landfills to the surrounding environment thanks to their “power” to be blown away with the wind.
Yuk! This reminds me of a garden I once made in Duluth, MN in the 1980’s only there was very little plastic. Most of the trash was broken glass, bits of corroded metal, and coal clinkers. I used a square of hardware cloth to sift out all the trash which amounted to a few wheelbarrow loads. The only good things I found was a Mercury dime, a token for a laundry, and few little bottles.
The garden turned out well.
Plastic infestation is crazy. It’s EVERYWHERE!I’ve successfully converted my boyfriend (who thinks my new way of life is crazy) to give up the majority of his single use plastic bags. Yay!
plastic bags are great for tying onto hi-tensile electric fence to ‘teach’ the deer to jump over rather than run though the fence. However, you are right, eventually, they do break down – we must be diligent to replace old ones with new ones before they blow away. Typically, i use the plastic bags as rubbish bin liners, then we burn all our trash, including the bags. However, as many as possible, i return for recycling. But mostly, i take my three big cloth bags shopping and ‘reduce.’