Think green and bag the bag

Going to the grocery store for milk and eggs? Reject the bag.

Or the hardware store for a box of screws and a couple switch plates? Or the video store to rent a new release? Reject the bag.

If you can carry your purchase in one hand, stop the automatic practice of having a clerk stick it in a plastic bag that will remain on this planet far longer than you will.

Plastic bags are a scourge. They end up in giant fish-choking cells in the oceans, they clutter the beautiful vistas of Africa. And, of course, they're filling up landfills everywhere.

A simple convenience has become a great inconvenience.

A consortium of local and state politicians and people from the retail industry knows what a problem plastic bags are. And it is doing something about it.

The Lake County Plastic Bag Recycling Task Force hopes that its efforts will catch on and spread across the state.

Roughly 70 grocery stores, drugstores and other retailers in Lake County are participating in a six-month pilot program set up by the task force to encourage customers to recycle plastic bags - and use fewer of them in the first place.

Jewel-Osco, Lowe's, Sunset Foods, Walgreens, Butera, CVS, JCPenney, PetSmart and Piggly Wiggly are among the companies that will put a special container near their front doors to collect used plastic bags.

The experiment is to last from June through the end of the year, with collections being weighed to gauge the effect on the environment. The idea is to present evidence that it's working to the state legislature in the hopes of growing the program.

"The rest of the state should now step forward and make this a mandate," said state Sen. Terry Link of Waukegan, a member of the task force.

Depending on their composition, plastics can be used in the manufacture of outdoor furniture and decking, clothing and more.

Besides encouraging recycling, the task force is pushing the use of reusable cloth bags - an even better idea.

A vice president at Sunset Foods said that the use of reusable bags in its stores has resulted in a 24 percent drop in plastic bag consumption over the last three years. Other stores, like Woodman's, sell their own cloth bags.

It makes good business sense for stores to do so: They make money on the cloth bags, save money on buying plastic bags. And they appeal to eco-minded shoppers.

The whole idea of recycling these plastic bags is a no-brainer and should be commonplace in the suburbs.

Everyone has a bag of bags in a closet, right? Start with that.