Summit County » CAST 2009 Reusable Bag Challenge

Aug 02 2009

CAST 2009 Reusable Bag Challenge

Published by david at 11:44 am under Environment

There are many more ways to recycle something than to stuff it in the Recycle bin. One of the most important and obvious ones is to simply re-use the item yourself! No need to use fuel to pick it up and haul it away to a recycling center counties or states away. Just use it again yourself! Summit County is big on plastic shopping bags, so CAST (the Colorado Association of Ski Towns) has teamed up with the Hight Country Conservation Center, other civic organizations and various towns in Summit County, to host the 2009 Reusable Bag Challenge. It’s a gala BYOB (bring your own bags) event! There’s a contest running between March 1 and September 1, 2009 as well. One in which EVERYBODY wins! The bags will be tallied up, and the place with the most bags will receive a five thousand dollar grant from Alpine Bank to fund a solar panel installation at their local school. That’s the grand prize, but when people recycle the bags by re-using them or turning them in, everybody wins!

The logo of the BYOB is a circle with “Got Bag?” In green letters. You’ll be able to recognize participating merchants by that logo at their stores. A partial list of those participants includes the City Market stores in Breckenridge and Dillion, Safeway in Frisco, Bighorn Materials in Silverthorne, Skee Vue Grocery & Liquors in Breckenridge, the Vitamin Cottage/Natural Grocers in Dillon, and Frisco’s Wal-Mart. In all, twenty-six mountain towns all across the Western U.S. are involved in this attempt to raise awareness of the high costs — both to the environment and to society as a whole — when we think of plastic shopping bags as a single-use “throw-away” item.

Why is it so important? Just in the U.S. alone, we use 100 billion plastics bags a year, costing $4 billion and using some 12 million barrels of oil. Plastic bags don’t biodegrade either.. They only PHOTOdegrade, which means that the sun breaks it down into smaller and smaller particles, each more toxic than the last. Out in the Pacific Ocean, an area twice the size of Texas is COVERED in them! What a mess, and remember, we weren’t using those bags at all just a couple decades ago! Think about the difference you can make by not taking new plastic bags home every time you go to the store!

Do your part; BYOB, and support these towns and merchants in their efforts to help Summit County and the rest of the country clean up our act! For more info on the CAST Challenge, contact Jen Santry at jen@highcountryconservation.org.

CAST 2009 Reusable Bag Challenge on FACEBOOK

Participating towns are Telluride, Aspen, Mountain Village, Snowmass, Basalt, Breckenridge, Silverthorne, Dillon, Frisco, Steamboat Springs, Grand Lake, Granby, Winter Park, Fraser, Estes Park, Crested Butte, Vail, Avon, Eagle, Gypsum, and Mnt. Crested Butte. Jackson Hole, WY, Park City, UT, Sun Valley, Ketchum, and Hailey, ID will also take part in the 2009 CAST challenge.

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