Plastic: Satan's child?

The more I read about plastics the more concerned I am about them, from the environmental perspective, our health, and the energy and fossil fuels it takes to create them.

A couple of helpful things we've stumbled about plastic. John found a great site: http://www.reusablebags.com, rich with information about the true evil nature of those little clear bags and drinking bottles, as well as lots of resources about how to avoid them. We've started to use reusable bags for both produce, as well as shopping bags. They work for most things...I still go for plastic for drippy meat packages. We also just bought all-stainless drinking containers for the kids for water for school. I've been really upset by a lot of the disposible drinking water bottle coverage lately...terrific that the issue is being talked about in the popular press, but disturbing that often the suggestion for a work-around is a plastic reusable bottle, such as Nalgene, as those release toxins into our bodies, particularly as they are washed repeatedly. Go metal! And it lasts forever. Now I need to search out metal containers for lunches.

Also, I wanted to remind everybody about the little story that appear in the news a year or so ago about the prevalence of lunch boxes with lead in the plastic sold widely in the U.S. This story was never widely covered but prompted us to test our lunch boxes. Probably a good thing to do this year as well as so many kids head back to school.