A Ridiculously Simple Way To Save Half A Trillion Plastic Bags A Year April 6, 2024 Alexa tells me we use 100 billion in the U.S. alone. We do this mainly because we either forget to bring a bag from home when we go to the store, or we’re not coming from home. So the store gives us a bag for our stuff, or a few bags, which we take home and throw out, even though most are eminently reusable. Even if you’re of a mind to see them reused, stores typically won’t (or legally can’t) take them back (could the plastic-bag lobby have had anything to do with that law?). But how about this? A stick-on hook outside the store, near the door, maybe like these that cost less than a buck each. Without even telling the store (plausible deniability!), you’d stick one up and hang a few bags on it, to get this started. Just above the hook, you’d tape a little TAKE ONE! sign that says, basically: Forget to bring your tote bag? Take one of these . . . . . . and next time, bring two or three for the hook. We waste 100 billion plastic bags in the U.S. each year. Save the planet! It could take a little while to catch on, but where’s the downside? Stores shouldn’t hate your hook — it could save their buying thousands of bags each month. Some might even give you permission to put the hook INSIDE, protected from the elements. Or — wonder of wonders — install an official Tote Hook themselves! Remember take a penny, leave a penny dishes back when there were pennies? These would be take a tote, leave a tote hooks. I pile up 50 or 100 indestructible Fresh Direct delivery bags each year that, for legal reasons, Fresh Direct can’t accept for reuse. But I’m certainly allowed to put one under my arm when I go to the supermarket or the hardware store or the liquor store. If there were TAKE ONE TOTE HOOKS nearby, I could just hang up my extras and feel good about it. No one would be forced to use a “previously owned” plastic bag or tote bag or Fresh Direct bag. But wouldn’t you grab one from the hook? Don’t you think this could catch on? A tote-ally painless, essentially effortless, no-cost way to save perhaps half of the trillion plastic bags humans waste worldwide each year. Maybe more. BILLIONAIRE BONUS Paul Krugman ponders Why Some Billionaires Support Trump. He ends with this: . . . I’d also speculate that even billionaires who recognize Trump’s authoritarian leanings probably imagine, if they think about it at all, that their wealth will protect them from arbitrary exercises of power. They should — but won’t — learn from the experience of the Russian oligarchs who helped put Vladimir Putin in power. They eventually discovered that once you’ve installed a dictator, your wealth isn’t the shield you might have thought it was and you may still find yourself sent to Siberia. And before you say that such worst-case-scenario thinking can’t possibly apply in America, bear in mind that the Trump alarmists have mostly been right and the apologists have mostly been wrong; I’m old enough to remember when Trump’s former acting chief of staff wrote that “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully.” So if you’re a billionaire — or even just a deci- or centi-millionaire — read the whole piece and then, perhaps, click here. Have a great weekend.