My Carbon Footprint

My carbon footprint is the size of a Sasquatch footprint. I go through Ziploc baggies faster than I go through toilet paper, or seltzers. Speaking of seltzers, I drink three cases of seltzer a week, that’s 36 cans to be recycled (or thrown in the trash when the recycling is too full and I am too lazy to ask to take it out), and that is not even counting the diet cokes, the beers and the bottles of wine. So what is a girl to do? Buy a keg of seltzer? Give up beverages that cannot be purchased in recycled containers like that weird water machine at the health food store to which you take your empty gallon containers and refill them for $1.50. Wait a second, you mean a water faucet? What a scam.

If only the seltzer man still delivered weekly, or the milk man? Maybe that is the problem. We no longer have the milk man who brings us our milk daily, picks up the old bottles and returns with new ones the next day. Or the Seltzer man, or the local farmer who gets me my eggs (when I pick them up in my own container) or the baker or butcher who cuts my meat fresh and gives it to me in butcher paper, not pre-packaged on a Styrofoam tray, over-wrapped with Saran wrap, date stamped and blasted with carbon monoxide to keep the meat from turning brown.

I feel bad that I actually don’t care enough to make any changes. I like the convenience and the disposability of my Ziploc bags. I buy them by the case from Costco. I hate that our family fills a large trash bag full almost every other day with trash, half of which I am sure I could compost or recycle or reuse. And the recycling thing, well, it’s just a pain. And I want there to be a clean, unspoiled world for our daughter to explore and discover. I think I am just going to have to make my contribution in another way. Maybe creating music, or gardening, or even raising a child to be socially, environmentally aware will be good enough. Or maybe it won’t but at least we will be happy trying.