No to Plastic Bag

I was buying some er... drugs from a pharmacy in Nilai and instead of a plastic bag, they gave me my purchase in this:
One might thought the pharmacy was too cheap to even pays for plastic bags but I am inclined to believe that the owner actually cared for the environment. Afterall, she has a WWF certificate in her name being displayed in the shop. According to her staff, the customers in the area tend to share the same sentiment too.

Plastic bags usage indeed has a role in the rapidly declining state of our environment but in a recent article in the Star, local plastic bags manufacturers defended themselves, reminding us that the environmental problem brought by plastic bags usage should not lies solely on them but also on the consumers, who usually discarded the bag after use without a second thought. The waste management in the country also created a problem as wastes cannot decompose without water and light. In fact, it was reported that 40 plus years old newspaper has been found intact beneath mountain of waste.

I don't know how rampant the problem is in other country but in mine, this lack of civic mindedness is indeed a cause for concern. I regularly see on the road litter being thrown out from a moving car - cigarette butt, tissue paper, empty drink package, plastic bag. and don't even get me started on the drain here. Why would someone throw anything into the drain is beneath me. Don't they know this will taint water that will eventually find their ways back to our pipeline? Or that they may clog our already compromised drainage system, making floods all the easier to occur?

Too often, people just said that one people cannot make a difference but really, they just couldn't care less. If only one person of 30 million Malaysian stop using plastic bag, that is 365 plastic bags saved and not discarded in a year. If every Malaysian adopt the same mindset, that is 300,000 plastic bags a day. This message comes from someone in the local group One Buck Short through Hitz FM. Sorry, I can't remember who but I don't know local group well. Will support them though, that's my New Year resolution 2010 :-)

But seriously folks, I already started by not littering around and declining a plastic bag for anything I bought that I can carry with my bare hands. I still forget to bring my own shopping bag but hey, at least I already have one. What are you doing to help preserve the environment?

ps: Don't worry about the street sweeper. They will be able to keep their job sweeping leaves that falls from trees naturally.