Welcome to the blog!

Hi there and welcome

Seeing as this is my first blog post on our brand spanking new Bag It blog, let me introduce myself. My name is Jeb, and I’m the guy in the movie. In case you haven’t seen the movie yet, first of all shame on you, and second, try and see it. In the movie I describe myself as an “average guy.” What does that mean? Well no one really knows exactly, but in my case I guess it means that I never really set out to be an environmental activist. In fact the issue of plastic was not really on my radar at all.

Now to be fair, I have always been a “turn off the lights,” “don’t leave the heat on when you’re away,” “ride your bike to work if you can,” type of guy, and oh yeah, also a “don’t take the plastic bag at the store if you don’t really need it” type of guy. You know, you buy one or two things, the girl or guy at the checkout immediately starts to put it in a bag for you, ’cause that’s just what they do, and you have to make the effort to actually stop them from doing it, which isn’t always easy because they have this kind of momentum that you have to interrupt. Sometimes I would just take the bag, so as not to cause trouble, and think to myself, “well I’m sure I’ll use that bag for something,” then it would end up under the sink with all the other bags, but I digress. I like animals, I like the ocean, I like kids (more on that later), and I don’t really like seeing bags stuck in trees or bushes or floating in rivers and ponds, etc., so I guess I was a good kind of “average guy” to start to learn more about plastic and its effects on our lives and on our environment.

I think the best way to describe my learning more about plastic was a sort of shock and amazement, one could call it shock and awe but that was already taken. I was amazed that there was this massive issue out there that I knew virtually nothing about. I had heard of “The Gyre,” which I pictured as a big floating island of trash out there somewhere, kind of like that thing Kevin Costner rode around on in Waterworld. I knew that bottled water seemed kind of silly to me, unless you lived someplace where you can’t actually drink the water, and I knew that we probably create too much trash and use too many resources to keep going like this forever, but I had no idea about the real scope of all these problems. I think I was probably just about average for how much I knew about the issues and problems that come with us using so much plastic in our lives. In that way I guess I am an “average guy” or average person. One who isn’t dumb or totally uninformed, but one who doesn’t, or didn’t, make it their life’s work to study and understand these things.

That is until Suzan asked me to help with the movie. Once that happened it was really amazing how this whole world of issues started to make itself known to me. All this stuff was taking place right under my nose. A world where there were all these problems arising because we consume, use and throw away so much plastic, not to mention the chemicals and toxins getting into our bodies while we use it. Although I somehow knew these things were all happening, I never really saw the whole picture, and I certainly never knew what I could do about it, or that I could actually do something about it.

So Welcome to the blog. We will try to keep it up to date, and I will try to share information and interesting or thought provoking things with you as I learn about them, ways to avoid using so much plastic without ruining your life or the life of your family*, and the continuing journey of our film Bag It. Thanks for reading.

*Using less plastic doesn’t really ruin your life, it can actually make you life better.