Pop tops replaced can openers or church keys if you will in the 60’s making it easy to open your favorite beverage in an aluminum can. However, after a decade of these discarded pieces of metal mostly ending up on the ground it was time for a new design. Oh and kids swallowing the tops because some people put them back in the can while drinking didn’t help. The tipping point may have been Jimmy Buffet stepping on one after he blew out out his flip flop in Margaritaville. Yes people thought nothing of tossing these tops onto the sandy beach they were enjoying. Since then we have cans where the tab stays with the can after opening. Now if someone could devise a way to keep cigarette butts off the ground. Anywho my main concern right now though is not gun violence, not nuclear missiles pointed at us, not terrorism, but plastic. Just stand outside a large store that uses plastic bags and roughly count how many you see going out in 15 minutes. Okay you’re not going to do that, let me just tell you it’s a lot and that’s just one store in one portion of one town. Now start to multiply that by billions and you’ll come up with the total of one trillion plastic bags go out every year worldwide! A lot of them are single use and don’t recycle very well. The cherry on the garbage pile sundae is a lot of people use a plastic bag to transport one or two items to their car. You no doubt have heard about the islands of plastic in our oceans or the schools of plastic bottles, or whatever you call them, below the surface. Some cities are fighting back. Malibu, California is banning plastic cutlery and drinking straws. Other cities in California are banning disposable plastics but the plastics lobby is very strong and often successful in fighting any bans. Many cities are charging for plastic bags or even paper bags to encourage reuse, good idea. Here’s a number, 1,000,000 plastic drink bottles are bought every minute and less than 50% are recycled. By the time you finish reading this another million bottles are heading out to eventually swim with the fishes. No wonder dolphins and whales are beaching themselves, hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean and they can’t take it anymore. They can’t find a clean patch of water so they end up on the beach where thank God there are no pop tops to hurt them. Maybe if Jimmy Buffet included some lyrics in a song there would be change, something like “i took home some dry cleaning and soon would discover, the plastic bag it came in would smother, my baby brother.”

Gunga gulunga,
Garry