BYOB

To follow up on my comments last week about the free reusable bags & using reusable shopping bags in general, take the carbon conscious consumer pledge to bring your own bag, and you also get a chance to win fun prizes.

Just a few fun (or not so fun) facts:

• 12 million barrels of oil & 14 million trees are wasted EACH YEAR to make plastic & paper bags!
• Most plastic bags are made from nonrenewable resources
• As I write this post over 469,000,000,000 plastic bags have been consumed this year!
• Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine animals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags (they think they're jellyfish)
• An estimated 8 billion pounds of plastic bags, wraps and sacks enter the waste stream each year in the US alone!
• While recycling the bags is better than throwing them in the trash, it is not cost effective to recycle them. Many bags collected for recycling are shipped to third world countries instead of recycling them.

So, take the pledge to start carrying reusable shopping bags!

There's also a link on the page with the pledge to print out a wallet buddy to keep your credit card (or cash) in, to remind you to stop and think twice before spending money.