On March 1, 2020, a new law will go in to effect in the State of New York. Grocery stores will be prohibited from using, single-use plastic shopping bags.
The reasons for the elimination of single-use plastic bags are clear:
- Plastic requires an enormous amount of petroleum and water to produce.
- It is commonly thought that it will take each piece of plastic approximately 500 years to totally decompose
- All plastic, whether manufactured in 1907 or last week are still part of our environment.
- And finally, when plastic breaks down in a process called “Photo Degradation,” it just means that there are smaller pieces of plastic.
Big pieces of plastic are bad, smaller pieces of plastic are worse and microparticles are ingested and become part of the food chain are the worst.
I am not singling out Ever Fresh, but I happened to be there today, Sunday, Oct. 11.
What I saw at Ever Fresh, was duplicated at every grocery store in Great Neck. Shopping carts cascading with heavy-duty shopping bags. Each bag containing a few items for the convenience of the purchaser.
The average single-use shopping bag is used for a total of 12 minutes but then stays with us forever.
There are three very simple questions we each have to ask:
- Do we agree that Torah commands us to be the stewards of the Earth?
- Do we recognize the harmful effects of plastic on the environment?
- What are we going to do about it?
The use of plastic shopping bags between now and March 1st will be as harmful to the environment as it ever was. Each day that we continue to use single-use plastic bags means the death to more sea turtles, more sea mammals and the million sea birds that perish each year from plastic ingestion.
Let Great Neck be the first community in New York State to say, “no we are not going to wait until March 1 and to implement the law as of 1/1/2020.
Elliot Rosenzweig
Great Neck
Elliot Rosenzweig is the chair of the Go Green Committee
at Temple Beth-El of Great Neck
Temple Beth-El of Great Neck is the first temple on Long Island to eliminate the use of single-use plastic bags.
