Ridiculously Simple Or Simply Ridiculous? April 8, 2024April 7, 2024 Re yesterday’s Ridiculously Simple Way To Save Half A Trillion Plastic Bags, a brilliant CEO me-mailed: Your post got me wondering: what would the impact be of not throwing out all our plastic bags? According to my half-assed calculations, 100 billion plastic bags weigh about 55,000 tons. Sounds like a lot until you realize that we throw out 268 MILLION tons a year. So, how much should we be willing to spend to reduce garbage by 0.2%? How much inconvenience and economic inefficiency should we bear for that goal? But I guess we no longer believe in math when it comes to religious questions? I replied: I see virtually no cost in putting up a hook, and virtually no inconvenience in bringing a tote bag to the supermarket. But I asked Alexa: “How much do 100 plastic bags weigh” (planning to multiply the answer by a billion). She said (I kid you not): “A hundred plastic bags weigh approximately 600,000 metric tons.” She also told me that each bag weighs 6 grams. So then I asked her to convert 600 billion grams into tons. “Six hundred billion grams is about 661,400 short tons.” Which is about 330,000 “real” tons — admittedly –still trivial compared to 268 MILLION TONS a year. So then I asked her how much plastic we throw away each year. She said: about 35 million tons. My conclusion? We are way overdue for lunch. When are you free? Over lunch, I will presumably ask my friend to help save democracy — this will come as no surprise to you or to him — and he, being a libertarian who hates Trump but has little patience for what he views as wrong-headed liberal economics, may or may not chip something in out of friendship. It will be a stimulating lunch either way. In the meantime, I have little doubt, one or two of you will put some real effort into getting numbers we can rely on. Alexa is a great resource (“Alexa: what time is the eclipse tomorrow?” “2:18pm”), but you guys are even better. BONUS: FROZEN SPINACH While we’re wandering through the WASTE NOT / WANT NOT aisle, tote bag in hand, I wanted to tell you that my ancient side-by-side refrigerator had an aneurism in December just as I was heading south for the winter. The freezer side was not cold enough to freeze things; the refrigerator side, barely below room temperature. I hate throwing things out — shopping bags, for example — but because today’s refrigerators are so much more efficient, and because the refrigerator repair estimate was “$575-per-hour plus parts” — if they could fix it at all — I figured: what the hell? You only live once. But it turned out the $1,199 replacement I coveted wouldn’t fit; and that even if I could find one that did, the current fridge is too big to remove. Even with the doors off, it’s too wide to squeeze through the kitchen door. “Well, how did they get it in there in the first place?” you ask. It is a mystery. Best guess: it was there before the kitchen was remodeled with a narrower door. Who knows? So here I was four months later, back north, ready to confront the problem head on, which meant approving the $575-an-hour estimate, hoping for the best, and taking everything out of the freezer in preparation. And that’s when I found three bags of Seabrook Farms microwaveable once-frozen creamed spinach stamped “sell by October 27, 2007.” As long-time readers know, this is just the sort of thing I love. Though no longer frozen, each pouch was still vacuum sealed. I ate them over three successive days while we waited for the GE replacement parts to arrive. Delicious. Nine hundred forty-seven dollars and twenty-one cents later, frozen is once again frozen, cold is once again cold, and all is right with the world. Have a nifty, thrifty week. Waste not, want not. Waste impoverishes us all.