Quarterly report

Today, I went back to the same bit of forest as I walked yesterday.

As I was picking up stuff in the parking lot, a woman came along with her dog and asked me, “Are you picking up garbage?”

I said, “Yes. Somebody has to.”

Here’s what I got:

• 3 pop cans
• 2 water bottles
• 1 pop bottle
• 1 Coffee Time Christmas cup + lid
• 2 McDonald’s soft drink cups + 1 lid + 1 straw
• 1 cigarette pack
• 1 beer bottle

Since it’s the end of March, I thought it was time for a quarterly report: Here are some very rough totals of the major litter items I’ve encountered over the last couple of  months.

• 129 coffee cups
• 85 water bottles
• 83 pop cans
• 16 pop bottles
• 16 beer cans
• 32 beer bottles

I took some of my finds to the The Beer Store and came out with $5.70. Enough to go for a beer.

PR problems

Picking up returnable bottles is proving profitable. Yesterday, I picked up three six-packs of empty bottles outside Nature’s Emporium.

Not sure of the connection here, but hey.

Today, I took the dog to the Kennedy part of the York Region Forest. There I turned up 5 empty Smirnoff Ice ultra vodka bottles, 15 water bottles, 2 pop cans, 1 beer can, 1 country style cup + lid, 1ziploc bag, and 1 blister pack.

I’ve become squeemish about soggy takeout cups, so am leaving them there. As well, they’re not recyclable, so when the pickup crew comes through they go into the garbage anyway.

As for the stuff I pick up, I like to think I’ve saved these reyclables from landfill.

While I was at it, I accidentally stepped on something brown and squishy……a banana.

In my dealings with PR people: The day after I blew up at the Tim Hortons media relations person, I called her back and apologized. She was going to get me all kinds of information about the amount of waste TimHortons generates, but I never heard.

So, I followed up a few days ago with another call, left a message and haven’t heard back. I’m leaving it there.

As for the McDonald’s media relations person. She wanted to see the blog first. Then she sent me an email with all kinds of fluffy generalities, such as “McDonald’s has led the Canadian foodservice industry by taking meaningful steps to reduce and better manage waste.” And, “…..we help organizers by promoting community Waste Reduction Week events and offering information to our customers and employees on how to reduce waste in their daily lives.”

One of them, I think, would be not to buy food at McDonald’s, but anyway…..

I’d love to put in the whole email, which was lengthy, but it doesn’t seem right.

I replied, asking for details, such as amount of money put into anti-litter initiatives and the proportion of the whole of certain initiatives it represented and the number of McDonald’s outlets whose employees who got out there and helped with anti-litter days, etc..

Three days later, I’ve heard nothing, and don’t expect to.

I used to be critical of the author of Fast Food Nation for overlooking the waste generated by these “restaurants”, but in the end, I think the fellow just wanted to get the book published before he died.

More wet statistics

As an adjunct to a previous post about bottled water, here’s some of what Kairos Canada (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives, www.kairoscanada.org) has to say about bottled water:

Waste: Millions of plastic bottles are not recycled and end up in landfills, in parks and along roadways. Nine out of ten plastic water bottles end up as garbage or litter.

That’s 30 million discarded plastic bottles each day— more than 10 billion a year. Large amounts of energy is consumed in manufacture, transportation, and recycling of the bottles.

Toxicity: In 2002, 1.5 million tons of plastic was used to package 6 billion gallons of bottled water. The production of this plastic leads to the release of a variety of chemicals.

Most smaller bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) which, according to the Berkeley Ecology Center, generates more than 100 times more toxic emissions than an equivalent amount of glass. Leaching of chemicals into the water is also a concern.

“Eight of the ten 5-gallon polycarbonate jugs we checked left residues of the endocrine disrupter, bisphenol A, in the water” (Consumer Reports 8/00).

More research is needed regarding leaching of harmful chemicals from all types of plastic bottles. Leaching increases with heat, raising concern about storage and transportation of the bottles.

No problems have been associated with refillable stainless steel containers.

Bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which has weaker regulations than the E PA regulations for tap water. (“ What’s in that Bottle?” Consumer Reports 1/03.) Bottled water sold within states is regulated only by state agencies. NRDC tested more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of bottled water. They found contamination exceeding allowable limits in at least one sample from about one-third of the brands, including synthetic organics, bacteria, and arsenic. (www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bwbwinx.asp)

WATER QUALITY: AWASH IN PLASTIC BOTTLES

The bottled water industry promotes bottled water as a h e a l t h y, trendy drink, without mentioning that it can cost 1,000 times as much as tap wa t e r. The Sierra Club believes that all people should have access to affordable, clean drinking water. This means protecting water sources and funding for upgrading municipal systems should be a national priority. If you are concerned about the quality or taste of your tap wa t e r, it is much cheaper to install a water filter on your tap to remove the pollutants than to depend on bottled water.

COST OF BOTTLED WATER

Cost Comparison

Bottled water can cost 1,000 times more than tap water —so much more it’s almost impossible to portray in a bar chart.

SOURCES:
Tap:$.0015/gallon average, American Water Works Association,2002
www.tawwa.org/story_of_water/html/costs.htm
Filtered:$.13/gallon average, www.waterfiltercomparisons.com
Bottled:$1.27/gallon average, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC),
March 1999 www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/bwinx.asp
tap water: $.0015/gallon
filtered water: $.13/gallon
$.25 $.50 $.75 $1.00 $1.25
bottled water: $1.27/gallon

GLOBAL CORPORATE THREAT

Having created a growing market for bottled water, transnational corporations are exercising their power to get access to springs, aquifers, and municipal water supplies to keep their profits flowing, with little regard for the environmental impacts of large water withdrawals. Nestlé has taken over many small, independent companies, set up much larger operations at local springs, and is aggressively pursuing new sites around the Unites States. Coke’s Dasani and Pepsi’s Aquafina brands depend on cheap municipal water in the United States. Coke’s bottled water operation in India is embroiled in controversy, where a “ Boycott Coke” campaign is underway.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP

• Avoid using bottled water unless absolutely necessary.
• Use reusable stainless steel containers and carry tap water with you when traveling.
• At public events and at home, offer pitchers of water.
• Find out where bottled water sold in your stores comes from and if the pumping is impacting the environment.
• Advocate for strict state and local groundwater laws to protect aquifers and other water resources.
• Ensure that good quality tap water is available for everyone in your community at an affordable price.
• Advocate for adequate funding and good public management of municipal water systems.
• Research the quality of your public drinking water.
• Join with Sierra Club in protecting our rivers, streams, and wetlands from pollution to assure high quality public water supplies.

To learn more and get involved in the Sierra Club’s bottled water campaign, visit
www.sierraclub.org/cac/water That’s just a very small lead to the fact that today, I picked up two water bottles. I must say that I pick and choose what I pick up.

The coffee cups are soggy these days, so it’s much easier to pick up bottles and cans. In fact, I did very little of that either. It’s just too overwhelming. Instead, I’m trying to find out from the town what its anti-litter initiatives are and am going to pummel it with ideas.
So, here’s my list:

• 3 pop cans
• 2 beer cans
• 2 water bottles
• 1 Country Style cup + lid
• 1 Tim Hortons cup
• 1 Coffee Time cup
• 1 cigarette pack
• 1 sample liquor bottle
• 3 full-sized liquor bottles
• 8 beer bottles

On a weekend walk, I also collected six beer bottles. My husband says I look like one of those old guys who comb the ditches.

So, I thought I’d play the part and went out of my way to look for bottles in parking lots. And, I consider myself successful.

When I returned a load of wine bottles to the Beer Store the other day, I got an earful from an employee about how they weren’t staffed to accept all the recyclables coming in and how they didn’t have warehouse space either.

Come summer, he predicted, people would be lined up out the door waiting to have their returns accepted. And, now there are loads of cardboard boxes to contend with too.

Under questioning, he did allow that The Beer Store bid on the contract for accepting these returnables, so that if there wasn’t enough staff etc. to do so, it was because head office hadn’t invested in it.

Water and waste

The David Suzuki Foundation doesn’t deal with waste and recycling, so I can’t get my number-of-water-bottles-in-a-year figure from them.

Instead, here’s a story pulled from the Toronto Region Conservation Authority’s website, which contains a figure on bottled water use in Canada, as well as lots of other scary information:

A long drink of (bottled) water

Remember the days when a drink of water was just a drink of water? You simply turned on the tap and filled your glass — and for only a fraction of a cent. In the past decade, however, our notion of drinking water has changed radically.

08/09/2006  - Whether it’s to stay hydrated, to avoid chemicals and pollutants, or simply for the sake of improved taste, more Canadians are passing up the faucet in favour of bottled water.

Last year, Canadians drank 28.5 billion litres of bottled water. And it’s not just plain spring water we’re drinking. Today, we’re awash in bottled water — you can choose between spring, mineral, artesian, purified, oxygenated, vitamin-enriched and even flavoured waters. With some brands costing as much as $1.80 a glass (250 ml), bottled water is big business. But is it any better than tap water?

Bottled water differs from tap water in two ways — the water source and how it’s distributed. The water that flows from your kitchen tap comes from the surface water of lakes, reservoirs and rivers. To destroy disease-causing bacteria and viruses, most drinking water supplies are disinfected with chlorine, although some cities use ozone and small amounts of chlorine to disinfect their water.

Most bottled water comes from protected underground formations, from which the water flows naturally to the earth’s surface. This water is collected at the spring or via a hole that taps the underground formation. Bottled water does not contain chlorine; instead, it’s purified using ozone or ultraviolet light.

On the whole, Canadians have access to clean tap water, thanks to chlorination. But water-treatment systems can fail from time to time. In May, 2000, the deadly contamination of the Walkerton, Ont., town water supply with E. coli bacteria raised serious concerns about the safety of drinking water in Canada — and caused many people to turn off the tap.

But adding chlorine to municipal water supplies is a double-edged sword. Chlorine does destroy disease-causing bugs, some of them deadly, but the disinfectant also reacts with decaying leaves and other organic materials to form compounds called trihalomethanes (THMs). In the lab, animals exposed to high levels of these chlorine byproducts have a greater risk of cancer. Research in humans has also linked long-term exposure to high levels of THMs with colon and bladder cancer.

High levels of THMs may also have an effect on pregnancy. A California study of 5,144 pregnant women found that women who drank five or more glasses of cold tap water containing at least 0.75 micrograms of THMs per litre were more likely to miscarry than those who drank less. According to data collected from eight Canadian provinces between 1994 and 2000, the average THM level in drinking water samples was 66 micrograms per litre. Health Canada’s guideline for THMs in drinking water is 100 micrograms per litre; the cancer risk at this level over a lifetime is considered extremely low.

If you don’t like the idea of chlorine byproducts in your tap water, you can filter out the majority of them. Pitcher-type filters and many faucet devices use an activated carbon filter to remove chlorine contaminants and chemicals such as copper, mercury and lead. Small amounts of lead can be harmful, especially to infants, young children and pregnant women. Symptoms of long-term exposure to low lead levels include anemia, impaired mental function, loss of appetite, fatigue, irritability and headache.

Lead can make its way into tap water from lead solder in plumbing, service connections or pipes in your home. Lead is more likely to be found in homes built before 1950 or in very new homes. (In newer homes, it takes several years for a protective coating of minerals to build up inside the pipes, which helps keep lead from leaching from solder into the water.)

Lead levels rise in tap water as it sits in the pipes. To reduce your exposure, run the cold water first thing in the morning and any other time the system hasn’t been used for a few hours. Be sure to use cold water for drinking, cooking and making baby formula, since hot water is likely to contain more lead.

If you don’t want to filter your water, you can drink bottled water instead. Technically speaking, bottled water is just water that’s sold in sealed containers — but there are differences. Spring water comes from a protected underground source. Mineral water is spring water, as well, but it must contain more than 500 milligrams per litre of dissolved solids, including calcium, magnesium and, in some cases, sodium.

The mineral content is often stated on labels in ppm (parts per million), which means milligrams per litre. For example, the sodium content of Appolinaris mineral water is 470 ppm, or 470 milligrams of sodium per litre. Spring or mineral water can also contain natural or added carbonation.

Not all bottled water comes from a natural spring, even if the label depicts pristine meadows, icy glaciers or blue Caribbean water. About 25 per cent of bottled water, including Dasani (Coca-Cola Company) and Aquafina (PepsiCo Inc.), is just purified tap water. Purified water is produced by distillation, de-ionization or reverse osmosis; it can come from a spring, a well or the municipal water supply.

Some bottled waters are just plain gimmicky. Manufacturers claim oxygen-enhanced waters pack more oxygen than regular water and taste better. Some companies even boast that oxygenated water is ideal to boost energy and physical performance. But one study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that oxygenated water had no impact on athletic performance. And when researchers analyzed the water, they found a single breath of air contained more O{-2} than an entire bottle of super-oxygenated water.

There is a downside to getting all your water by twisting off a cap — too little fluoride, a mineral needed to reduce the likelihood of developing cavities. Unlike tap water, most bottled waters don’t contain optimal fluoride levels (0.8 to 1.0 ppm). Only a few brands have added fluoride. Check the label to see if a particular bottle of water contains the mineral — you’ll find the fluoride content listed in ppm.

If you drink bottled water, don’t assume it’s immune to bacterial contamination. Be sure to refrigerate an opened bottle, in case harmful bacteria have been introduced since the seal was broken. Don’t re-use your water bottle, either; such bottles are intended for single use only. Refrigerate bottled water once you buy it, or store it in a cool place away from heat, sunlight and household chemicals. Check bottling and best-before dates to ensure freshness. Bottled water can be stored for up to two years.

The bottom line: Stay hydrated. The source of water you use is a personal decision, but make sure you drink enough. Men need 3 litres of water a day and women need 2.2 litres; you need more water during physical activity and hot, humid weather. Not all of our water requirements have to come from drinking water — fruit and vegetable juices, milk, soy beverages, even coffee and tea count, too.

And in case you’re wondering, I drink bottled spring water. I made the switch after I became tired of refilling my Brita pitcher numerous times each day — in my house we go through a lot of water.

Leslie Beck, a Toronto-based dietitian at the Medcan Clinic, is on CTV’s Canada AM every Wednesday.
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I do have the decimal point in the right place. If all that comes in 500 millilitre bottles (which I know it doesn’t) that means that we go through 57 billion water bottles a year.

So, I guess I can’t complain if I find a few of them around. Even so, it seems an unnecessary use of oil.

Making progress

Today, I did my same old walk to Sheppards Bush. While I came back with two grocery bags full of stuff, it was from a slightly different route and last week’s routes are staying pretty clean.

I pick up an awful lot of water bottles and have emailed the David Suzuki Foundation and the Recycling Council of Ontario to see if I can find out what proportion of what’s used ends up on Aurora streets.

While I’m waiting for answers, here’s today’s litter count:

• 8 Tim Hortons coffee cups. Three of them are the roll-up-the-rim type and although I looked, could not find the anti-litter reminder their PR person told me about.
• 4 T.H. lids
• 1 coffee club cup (that’s a new one for me)
• 6 plastic water bottles
• 4 pop cans
• 1 plastic pop bottles
• 1 McDonalds soft drink cup
• 1 Slushie cup
• 1 rigid plastic Trident gum container
• 2 beer cans
• 2 beer bottles
• 2 newspaper bags
• 1 bungie cord, missing a hook

A friend of mine remarked on how dairies and soft drink companies used to use re-usable containers and take them back themselves. Now, they’ve downloaded the expense to us while they walk away with the profits.

Perhaps it’s time to get serious about the European model, that’s been talked about for years, that manufacturers are responsible for dealing with the waste from packaging. When they pay for it and need to dispose of it, maybe that’s when things will start to happen.

Back to work

Floyd got lucky today with some street food. Later, it was two tennis balls.

Thanks to Heather of Aurora for her words of encouragement (see comment below) and for linking me to her blog. At eight viewers a day, I feel as if I’m toiling in obscurity, although I do this fortherayp.

I’ll return the favour and link to hers.

Yesterday was garbage and recycling and you could tell by the street. Lots of leftovers that didn’t make the truck and then left behind by busy, tired homeowners. If this is the outside of their house, you have to wonder what the inside looks like though. I really think it’s fine.

Here’s the list:

• 1 Tim Hortons cup + bag
• 1 Ikea Food cup (I cheated on this obvious import and went up onto someone’s lawn to get it. Good for the novelty factor).
• 1 Icee cup (too cool)
• 3 pop cans
• 1 pop bottle
• 3 water bottles
• 1 juice box + straw
• 1 Slushie cup (# 6 plastic, so recyclable)
• 1 Wendy’s chip container
• 1 cigarette pack
• 1 flower pot (also #6 plastic)
• 1 toilet paper roll
• 1 empty med bottle
• 1 envelope
• 1 flyer
• 1 plastic lid
• 1 dinner fork (for my house)

Here’s what’s on Yonge Street the day after garbage day.

Break time

Last evening I picked up a grocery bag’s worth of stuff and this morning too. I feels so disgusted and overwhelmed by the amount of garbage out there, I put it right into recycling and the garbage as appropriate without the usual sorting and counting.
My husband says by picking up litter I’m hiding the problem. What I intend is that just as New York cleaned up its streets, making it psychologically more difficult to break windows, pee in the streets or whatever, I hope to create clean streets here, making it less enticing to toss stuff.

But, my walk today, which again covered the same route as Mon-Thurs, blew a hole in my theory. There were Tim Hortons cups in a place I know I’d left clean yesterday. Allowances made for people in a hurry kicking stuff out of their cars by accident, but still…

My walks have taken me through the train station. Yesterday morning there was a bag of discarded McDonalds stuff I just couldn’t bring myself to pick up. Today it was gone. I see an employee there every morning sweeping up, and I appreciate what she does.
Lots to do though. There’s litter in the hedgerow of the new parking lot.

On another topic: my brother and his wife just came back from living three years in Brisbane, Australia, population 1.5 million. It hasn’t rained there for the past two years and water restrictions have become increasingly tight.

First, it was don’t water your garden with a sprinkler, use a hose; then it was don’t use a hose, use buckets. If you’re over 75 you can use the hose though.

When the reservoir levels hit 20 per cent (they’re now at 21 per cent) Brisbanians (?) won’t be able to water their lawns and gardens at all.
As well, the government instituted a program to replace toilets with half and full flush. The half flush uses maybe two cups of water my brother said.
Needless to say, we’re lucky here, but if we continue to live the way we do, I worry we could be facing that scenario.

The rubbish continues

Aurora’s slogan is, “Aurora, you’re in good company.” It used to be, “Aurora, my kind of town.”

Sorry folks, but these days, neither of those fits for me. It’s my third day walking over the same route to Sheppard’s Bush and back and once again, I’ve got a full grocery bag full of garbage. That makes four, plus the one bag of bags.

After this, I’m emailing the town with my litter concerns. I’m sure they have them too.

Here’s the count:

• 11 Tim Hortons coffee cups + 8 lids
• 3 Country Style coffee cups + 1 lid + 1 bag (donuts and fresh food ideas)
• 2 McDonald’s french fry containers
• 1 McDonald’s bag for chicken McNuggets
• 2 Wendy’s french fry containers
• 1 styrofoam cup with green foamy stuff
• 1 generic coffee cup lid
• 8 pop cans
• 1 plastic pop bottle
• 2 plastic water bottles
• 2 generic plastic bottles
• 1 glass apple juice bottle
• 1 v. large Corona bottle  (more money)
• 1 lighter
• 2 cigarette packs
• 1 small yogurt cup
• 1 work glove
• 1 blue elastic band (I have a friend who gathers these and returns them to the post office.)
• 1 Junior mint box
• 1 dental floss tool

More rubbish

The snowbanks are yielding to the mud and pavement and releasing their winter treasure of trash. As a result, this town is a mess, and I’m disgusted and embarrassed to live here. I took three walks today: one to Sheppards Bush, one up Yonge Street and the other up Spruce and back down Walton.I only picked up one bag of litter, on the walk through Sheppard Bush, because I’m still feeling revolted by yesterday’s haul and overwhelmed what I see.

Yonge Street from Mark to Orchard Heights is littered with….litter. I would have ended up with a permanent stoop if I’d decided to pick it all up, and I wouldn’t have done anything else all day.

The fellow at Oak Ridge Meats says it’s a full-time job. Every morning he and his partner pick up litter resulting from the fast food restaurants on either side of them, Quizno’s Sub and Topper’s Pizza. He said that no one from those stores ever bothers to come out and pick up after their customers, who apparently buy their meals, eat them in their cars and toss the resulting litter into the parking lot.

We got into this discussion after I picked up an abandoned Country Style coffee cup and lid outside his store.

I’m going to check with the town to see if there’s a bylaw for this kind of behaviour. If there isn’t, perhaps there should be, because taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill to clean up after these slobs.

It’s amazing to think that one of the postal codes in Aurora used to have one of the highest average incomes in Canada. You’d never know it by driving down our main street.

Lots of people here are complaining about Wal-Mart coming and how it’s going to destroy the downtown, but I think the downtown is destroying itself.

And, there are those who would like Aurora to become an eco-tourist destination. There’s work to be done before that happens.

A walk down Spruce Street, a residential street, showed lots of stuff lying in the street and on the sidewalks. I don’t know how people can just walk over and around this garbage. But, maybe that’s the point. They don’t walk, therefore they don’t see what kind of trash heap this place is.

Useful info learned today: Both the cardboard and foil components of cigarette packs are recyclable, but need to be separated. However, because of York Region’s one-stream system, the foil would likely be sorted out by size unless it’s balled up to a size greater than 2.5 inches in diameter.

Otherwise, it’ll just fall through into the waste heap.

Trash count for today:

• 2 Tim Hortons cups + 2 lids
• 1 Country Style cup
• 2 Wendy’s french fry containers
• 1 McDonald’s soft drink cup + lid + straw
• 1 plastic disposable cup
• 2 Sports Drink bottles
• 2 plastic soft drink bottles
• 2 Coke cans
• 1 energy drink can
• 1 beer can
• 1 strawberry daquiri bottle (money in the bank for me)
• 1 TetraPak juice container (from my neighbours lawn)
• 1 Kool Aid Jammer pouch
• 1 M & M package
• 2 cigarette packs
• 2 9-volt batteries
• 1 plastic spoon
• 8 plastic water bottles

David Suzuki is on a tour deriding bottled water. He’ s concerned about the water sources. I’m concerned about the oil used to make the bottles and the greenhouse gases used to ship them, then pick them up for recycling, etc.

Those that drink bottled water are concerned about water quality. However, they’re overlooking the effect on air quality the bottles are  having.

On the to-do list: Find out how many bottles Ontarians use in a year.

The rubbish of spring

I sent the photos from the last post to the town asking who should be cleaning this up. They were generous and thought someone had just mistaken their recycling day. I have my doubts because I’ve seen the stuff there for a while, but will wait until this Thursday to see if it goes.

Then, I’ll call the town again to pick it up. There are a few piles of stuff around, now getting soggy in the melting snow.

A walk to Sheppards Bush and back yielded three grocery bags full of stuff:

• 5 Tim Hortons cups + 6 lids
• 1 double-cupped Tim Hortons cup
• 3 Country Style cup + 1 lid
• 1 Java Stop cup
• 1 Starbucks cup (this was found under a tree beside a newly emptied garbage can. I saw the public works truck empty them. Too bad the workers couldn’t make the extra effort).
• 2 plastic Coke bottles
• 6 water bottles
• 1 A & W soft drink cup
• 2 Wendy’s soft drink cups
• 1 Wendy’s cup with french fries
• 1 Reid’s Dairy cup
• 1 chocolate milk carton + straw
• 1 yogurt container
• 1 plastic V8 bottle
• 1 empty plastic bottle steering stop leak fluid
• 1 beer can
• 4 beer bottles
• 1 vodka bottle
• 1 Grand Marnier sample bottle
• 5 cigarette packs
• 1 chocolate bar wrapper
• 1 Cheeto’s crunchy bag
• 1 bread bag with a bagel in it (lunch?)
• 1 rag
• 1 blue plastic bag
• 1 newspaper bag
• 1 package left from pepperettes
• 1 handknit mitten (it’s been sitting on a post in Sheppards Bush for months)
• 2 Sobey’s grocery bags found in separate spots
• 1 grocery bag full of grocery bags (neatly placed under a lamp post in the GO station parking lot)

According to a Toronto Star article written in January, Canadians use 2.5 billion grocery bags a year. It seems a bit much.

So many, we’re starting to see them on trees around town. I ski on the Niagara Escarpment and even there, in a really rural area, I’ve seen them festooned from branches.

I was on a back trail last weekend and thought I saw one there, but it was really a wasps’ nest.

Things to do with grocery bags? Try not to use them. I have a big purse I can stuff lots of things into. Then there are cloth bags sold by some grocery stores.

And, if you do accumulate some anyway, the library likes them to give to patrons on rainy days. The Helping Hand in the basement of Trinity Anglican Church also uses them to bag the clothes it sells.

What not to do with grocery bags: Put them in the recycling bins. They get sorted out anyway and run the risk of becoming entwined in the machinery.