BagFest rolls on. Guest author Elizabeth Royte blogged about last weekend's BagFest recycling action for the Huffington Post today. She wrote:

Bags are made from oil: it takes about 430,000 gallons of oil to produce 100 million plastic bags, and the U.S. goes through 380 billion of them a year. A statistics class at Indiana U did the math: more than 1.6 billion gallons of oil are used each year for bags alone. That was the front end, but bags are bad news on the back end too, the kids learned. They clog drains, snag in trees, and choke wildlife on land and at sea. In landfills, plastic bags take up very little space, but in an incinerator they generate small but potent amounts of dioxin, a carcinogen, and carbon dioxide, a you-know-what.

So the service learning project from our lively but unknown campus ripples outward again, thanks to blogging.

Royte's piece looks further into the self-defense mechanisms that prevent a company like Wal-Mart from getting more radical about ecology. That's too bad, too, because a more daring approach to environmental impact would sure complicate some people's attitude toward the company. [0 & P]