The latest marketing
promotion: Buy green

By MARY LOU MONTGOMERY
Of the Courier-Post

I’m relatively amused by the current trend toward “green.” I’m not an anti environmentalist by any means, please don’t get me wrong; instead my amusement comes from the marketing ploys behind the thrust to sell “green” to the masses.
I’ve lived enough years to be a little skeptical of pushes to change the buying patterns of Americans. I’m particularly interested in the current initiative to stop the flow of plastic grocery bags from markets to homes. They don’t decompose, we’re told. They’re made of chemicals that pollute the environment in both the manufacturing process and in the landfills, environmentalists say.
So what’s new about that? Where has this information been during the last quarter century? Those bags have been a shopping staple for at least that many years. Way back when, I noticed a plastic bag dangling from a tree branch, and wrote a column about it. I pointed out the fact that it wouldn’t decompose for many, many years, and mused about its long-term impact on our landscape.
But all of a sudden, those bags are a big deal. No one has mentioned the plastic on diapers that are filling the landfills, or the plastic beverage containers that long ago replaced the glass bottles, which children collected and returned to the markets to be cleaned and reused. No one is talking about all of the plastic packaging that we throw away every day, on our food and our toys and our personal care products. Or the paper towels or extra absorbent tissues or the plastic children’s shoes that light up when they walk. Everywhere we look, there is merchandise that lasts a little while and then we throw it away.  And no one has mentioned the big, heavy plastic bags that we put those little bags and all that other plastic in for the journey to the landfill that most people don’t know where it’s located.
So here we are in this crazy throw-away world, with products containing God-knows what chemicals made by workers who earn pennies on the dollar in countries where English isn’t even the second language. We’re reading every day about how many more Americans have been laid off and how new maladies are affecting the masses or how many boys have died in Iraq.
But thank God, there is an answer to our troubles. If we all go out and buy a green canvas bag to carry back and forth to the grocery store, we can help save the environment. The bags are available for sale right there at the check out counters. They’re labeled with a proud message, identifying the user as someone who cares about this earth and its future.
Who wouldn’t want one of those bags?
For one, me.
You see, I already repurpose those plastic bags. I use them to discard stinky stuff, like spoiled food or our dog’s gifts from the yard. I use the bags to take my lunch to work, or to bring my dirty dishes back home.  I use them to cover my garden statues during the winter, and my daughter used them to dispose of soiled diapers when my grandchildren were younger. And if I end up with more bags than I can use, there’s the recycling bin right there at the entrance to many grocery stores.
My skepticism leads me to ask: Who started this push to sell canvas bags to the masses? A fabric manufacturer who needed an outlet for a product?