[Reeses]

Banning plastic shopping bags is trendy but the reason they are so inexpensive is because they use so little resources in their manufacture and distribution. Price is an excellent indicator of total greenness, a fact the envi-mentalists can’t accept.

[conservativeharleyguy]

The last time I bought new carpet, I picked out a very nice Berber weave that turned out to be made of recycled plastic bags. Greenies never mention stuff like that. They'd have rather forced me to buy carpet made from free-range, organically-fed alpaca wool from some fourth-world, “sustainable”, free-trade millinery (loosely translated from hippy-speak: “high cost, low quality”). Lowe's works just fine for me.

[cheee]

I was visiting my left-leaning son and his flaming-liberal girlfriend recently in Pittsburg (they attend CMU).

Anyway, he and I went to the grocery store and bought, among other things, a couple of portobello mushrooms for his girlfriend. He was going to carry them in his hands for a couple of blocks back to their place rather than get a small plastic bag to carry them. I would have none of it and put them in a bag for him.

The engineer in me wouldn’t let it go.

So, I asked him: “How much oil do you think it takes to make a plastic bag like this?”

His answer: “Some, I guess. I don’t know.”

My response: “Here’s a hint. Consider the weight of this plastic bag. The weight is essentially the same before and after. You can measure the amount of oil needed to produce it in ‘drops of oil’.”

cheee