Double plus use your own bags!

Bag Monster tours the country on his ENV (Environmentally Neutral Vehicle). Photo: BagMonster.com.

Back on March 29, when I first started Lindsay’s List, I opened my blogging with the topic Just Bag It, calling reusable bags the “duh!” of the conservation lifestyle and movement.

It seemed to be stating the obvious, repeating a message often touted among eco-types, greenies and treehuggers the world over.

But coming from the communications world, I knew that people have to be hit with a message a minimum of seven times for it to sink in. So I figure that pretty much any conservation tip I cover on Lindsay’s List, whether it’s new news or not, is worth sharing.

Taking the bullet for re-users everywhere

In that post I pointed to a few different reusable bag makers as sources where you can get good looking reusable bags. One of those companies was ChicoBag™ Company, an outfit out of California with a great environmental commitment, solid activism and a fabulous product. I wish they manufactured in the US, but otherwise I love ’em!

But the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition (Pahleeze!) doesn’t like ChicoBag™ Company, and neither do Hilex Poly Company, LLC, Superbag Operating, LTD., and Advance Polybag, Inc., some of the the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition’s members. Those companies have decided to advance a SLAPP lawsuit (in layman terms, that’s a lawsuit brought by the rich and powerful against the little guy to intimidate them and try to bleed them dry in or out of court) against ChicoBag™ Company.

It just get’s more insidious

And guess what? To avoid California’s anti-SLAPP law, those schmucks filed suit in South Carolina.

What jerks!

The suit claims that ChicoBags posts unsubstantiated claims about the impact of plastic on its site in an attempt to sell more reusable bags and sully the reputation of plastic bag makers. Apparently, the good old corporate behemoths at Hilex Poly, Superbag, and Advance Polybag, have never taken a vacay to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Nor have they gotten the memo that plastic never biodegrades. Seriously, feel free to bequeath that Coke bottle to your progeny in perpetuity.

Class warfare always begins from above

You know what I feel about these three plastic companies and their pals at the phony baloney Save the Plastic Bag Coalition? Well, besides things that a lady-like chick such as myself shouldn’t commit to print, I also feel a pang of deep compassion for the Coalition. I just wanna say, “Poor widdle owld pwastic companies are seeing their profits shrink. Boo hoo!”

Wait, I thought these were just the kind of free-market guys who keep claiming that it’s the market that decides? Apparently except when consumer behavior changes and they don’t like the results.

Guess what pals? You need to retool your freaking business model. Are you seriously going to try to intimidate others, showing that you have no interest in the free market after all. Are you really going to go crying to what you would otherwise deem the big nanny government to come rescue you when you don’t come out on top?

Losers.

Let’s not stand for this

Now more than ever, I am determined, as I said on the Real Life With Jennifer Till Show, to help spread the message that no self-respecting man or woman should be caught with a disposable plastic bag.

I hope that there’ll be tons of coverage of this case and backing by the broad eco-community in ChicoBags’s favor as a rallying point against the blatantly abusive practices of  intimidation and plutocracy that corporate knobs perpetrate against the little guy.

There’s a saying, made startlingly clear in the amazing film The Winslow Boy. The saying is “Let Right Be Done.” The rightest thing that could be done is for this case to be thrown out of court and restitution paid to ChicoBags for the hassle.

In the meantime, here’s a few quick things you can do:

• Like ChicoBag on Facebook and follow their blog at BagMonster.com.
• Visit the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition website and tell them to urge their members to cease their frivolous lawsuit and intimidation of legitimate business alternatives (they’re too wimpy to allow comments on site, so you have to use their e-mail field. Wankers!).
• Join thousands of others working to cut down on disposable-bag trash in the Plastic Pollution Coalition on Facebook.

I hope everyone reading this will vow to never again use a shopping center plastic bag again. And that more stores will encourage reusable bags with big signs on site, just as Whole Foods does. There you go Coalition, why don’t you sue Whole Foods next?

Or maybe you could ask Uncle Sam for a bailout and get your own slice of the fleece-the-taxpayer pie. You big babies.

–Lindsay Curren, Lindsay’s List