Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
ARLINGTON — Arlington is moving ahead with plans to ban on plastic grocery bags. City leaders say they are fed up with those bags trashing the city and the budget.
The city of San Francisco has already enacted a similar ban on lightweight plastic bags.
The ban will not affect heavier plastic bags, just the lightweight ones that get used once and then end up in a landfill or maybe even worse, end up clogging up a storm sewer, littering a park, or clogging up a stream bed.
It’s not just a matter of clutter. It’s a matter of money. The landfill spends $11,000 every month just trying to control the plastic bags that blow around.
City councilwoman Kathryn Wilemon is heading a committee recommending a ban on the plastic bags. She showed pictures of all the litter around and said that the city spends more than a $1 million a year just picking the stuff up.
The council told her to go ahead and draft an ordinance to stop grocery stores and other merchants from using the lightweight plastic bags.
“I think that our citizens will agree, and we’ll start doing this just like seatbelts. When we started out with seatbelts, we all had kind of a hard time getting used to that. Now who would think of getting in a car without a seatbelt? So it’s just a new way of doing things,” Wilemon said.
It is a radically different new way of doing things. San Francisco enacted its ban about a year ago. They think they take about five million of those plastic bags out of circulation every month.
It’s going to take Arlington several months to draft an ordinance and to work with grocery stores and other merchants about alternative packaging. They want to get people thinking about using re-useable bags that you can take to the grocery store over and over again. They don’t end up clogging up the landfills or costing the city a lot of money.
About 380,000 people live in Arlington. It’s going to be one of the biggest cities to take this step — if they go ahead with the plan — a few months from now.
E-mail jdouglas@wfaa.com
