This Halloween: 1). Watch Out For Witches' Drawers, and 2). Don't Get Buried

600.

Depending on the context, that can be a big or small number:

--600 piece of candy in your Halloween trick-or-treat cache--major score! 

--$600 extra in your bank account--not too shabby. 

--Infestation of 600 spooky spiders in your bed at the same time--another story entirely! 

How does that number feel when you look at this statistic:  600 is the average number of plastic bags a person uses in the year.  Given a plastic bag's life span is approximately 20 minutes (from store to your door), that's a lot of needless waste.  It's something that most certainly could bury you!! 

The picture above is a near-classic Halloween scene.  No it's not a T.P.'d tree, but rather a tree that's gnarled branches have reached out to grab wayward plastic bags, floating in the wind.  It reminds me of an essay in Recycle This Book: 100 Top Children's Book Authors Tell You How to Go Green, edited by Dan Gutman. Jon Scieszka, of the Time Warp Trio book series and The Stinky Cheese Man fame, wrote an essay all about these wayward bags called "Stamp Out Witches Drawers."  After reading it and seeing the video below (that will show you what it's like to be buried in plastic), you'll come to hate plastic bags as much as Jon Scieszka and I do.  Click the title above, or go to http://plasticpollutioncoalition.org/2010/08/buried-in-plastic/ to learn more.



To read  Jon Sciezka's "Stamp Out Witches' Drawers" from Dan Gutman's book Recycle this Book click here (see page 150):
http://books.google.com/books?id=VPFDXCz99EYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22recycle+this+book%22&source=bl&ots=CKHQXwHB2r&sig=32Csh5qK4Orvm57vnOz-meRTat0&hl=en&ei=XXbNTIfgHIKdlgehsMmtBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11&ved=0CEsQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&q&f=false

PS...Only 6 days until the November 6  TEDx Great Pacific Garbage Patch live-stream event.  For more details, go to http://www.tedxgreatpacificgarbagepatch.com/ 

Picture from http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y139/hunter63/bags-in-tree_zpsfd227ffc.jpg