Sinclair HVAC and Plumbing Guest Article: One Bag at a Time

Guest Author: James Gallet is the owner of Envirotech Heating, Cooling, and Energy Solutions out of Emporia, Kansas. Envirotech has been recognized as a national and local leader when it comes to HVAC; Envirotech has been featured in several national trade magazines and James recently started speaking at local and national conferences. He is a business partner and friend of mine. We have been involved in a ACCA group for the last 5 years and I have learned a lot from James. I hope you enjoy his thoughts and learn as much as I have from him.

Over the past weekend my wife and I had a child free night, so what did we do? We went grocery shopping(I know how romantic). Well I ended up turning this adventure into a learning situation for myself. This school year my kids have been learning a lot about waste and things we can do to help eliminate landfill waste. One thing that has been addressed was the plastic bags we get at the stores and how many we waste. My wife has recently added two reusable grocery bags to the stuff that isfloating around in our family vehicle, you know the onesI am talking about they come in several different colors. Well I had no idea how much one of these bags canhold, each bag probably had equivalent to two or three plastic bags worth of items in it.I also was notaware that some stores will actually give you a credit for using the recycle bags asopposed to using theirs, cha-ching$$$.

These reusable bags got me asking some questions and doing research. I already knew that plastic is bad for landfills and is not biodegradable, but here is what elseI learned in doing my research: U.S. households dispose of nearly one hundred billion (that’s right 100 Billion) bags annually, millions of which end up littering the environment and harming wildlife (just take a look at the side of the highway next time you are driving and I bet you will see a few).If you reduce your plastic bag consumption by just two bags a week, you would throw away at least 100 fewer bags a year. Ifeveryone in America did this and we tied all of thosebags together handle to handle we would make a rope big enough to wrap around the earth 126 times. WOW!

I know that sometimes plastic is great so if you do use plastic bags,please recycle or reusethem somehow. You can take your plastic bags back to many stores wherethey have recycle bins for them.I propose the newquestion should be: Paper, Plastic or Reusable?

Please pass this along…James

Is there a grocery store in Lubbock that gives credit for recycable bags?