Practice what you teach on plastic bags

PHOTOGRAPHER: Letters to the Editor

Your Sept. 17 editorial [“Time to get plastic bag crisis under control”] on the casual overuse of plastic bags and their downstream fate to clog our trash, inland rivers and bays and pollute our oceans is a helpful reminder to bring our own reusable bags to all the stores we frequent.

But The Gazette could also practice what you teach. Your wonderful carriers who deliver here and to thousands of readers each day also have to play weathermen by deciding whether or not to put the day’s newspaper into thousands of blue plastic bags in the event of inclement weather. Those thousands of Gazette plastic bags end up where? Thanks to your editorial, we know where they end up. None of those blue plastic bags are, to judge by what’s not printed on them, post-consumer recycled. Please make sure they are.

More to the point, if the day is merely foggy or overcast, most of the bags you require your carriers to use are simply not needed. The blue Gazette boxes into which the papers are placed give the day’s newspaper pretty good protection in any weather.

So here are suggestions for The Gazette: 1) Let subscribers exercise choice. Give me a way to say to our friendly carrier: No plastic please, ever. The familiar Gazette blue box is just fine protection; 2) If a subscriber wants their blue plastic bag reused, let them put the plastic back in their Gazette box as a signal to the paper carrier that it should be reused.

If The Gazette has a better idea to reduce the use of its own plastic bags, please share and then do it. Thanks.

David Gibson

Ballston Lake