ENVIRONMENTAL HUMOR

I’ve Got a Plastic Monkey on My Back

Confessions of a failed environmentalist

Medium wants us to make our own graphics. So don’t blame me.

I recycle. A lot.

I recycle the right things, the right way.

(Today I saw somebody’s old satellite TV dish in a community recycling bin. I’m pretty sure that’s not where that goes.)

I’m the kind of militant recycler who harangues everybody at the office about throwing cardboard away while turning lights off with one hand and fishing empty water bottles out of the trash with the other.

I worship the woman I saw online once whose entire year’s worth of unrecycled trash was something like half an eggshell and a piece of dental floss.

But I have a secret. A terrible, petroleum-based, seal-strangling secret.

I’m hoarding plastic shopping bags.

And not, like, a couple plastic shopping bags.

I am hoarding hundreds of plastic shopping bags, in preparation for the day when they become illegal.

I probably don’t have that much to worry about since only 12 states have banned single-use plastic bags. Apparently, there’s a partial ban here in Ohio on at least the county or municipality level, but you wouldn’t know it by…