Ban The Bag! Environmental Health Will Drive You Glad!

Coming from Portland, where the Ban the Bag campaign is in full swing, and having studied other ban-the-bag types of actions, it's weird for me to come to Bulgaria where this perspective simply doesn't exist. In many places, the countryside is completely littered with plastic bags, plastic water bottles, cigarette butts, and various other garbages. People throw away plastic products as carelessly as they buy and use them.

It reminds me of a conversation I had on my first trip through Bulgaria with my favorite colleague. He told me that older Bulgarians (over 40) who still have a bit of communist mentality are so dependent upon the government that they believe there's no environmental problem unless the government says there is. And even then, the government would take care of it, not the people. I see various examples of this mentality in different ways, but the following have been sadly amusing.

I don't usually bring my canvas bags to the store when I'm only going to buy an item or two so when the cashier tries putting my snickers bar or roll of toilet paper into a bag I say something to the affect of "I don't need/want one." The reactions have been astounding!
"Well, here's one just to have one."
"You have to have one."
"It doesn't matter, here's one anyway."
One day, I had forgotten my canvas bags. I took one bag from the store, filled it with some bread, yogurt, and meat, and went to the checkout. The gal pulled out another bag and said, "You can't do it like that, your bread will get dirty." I told her it was okay, and that I only wanted one bag. So, she wrapped the bread with a different bag and put it inside the first bag and said with a smile, "There ya go. Only one."

The following picture was taken at a beautiful reservoir near Krichim, where I lived for three months during my training.When I see how readily people take plastic bags from the market, how often I see them blowing in the wind, and how little people care, it makes images like the one above understandable, but certainly not justifiable. Communism may have filtered out wonderful things like personal responsibility, and Captain Planet, but by heck, communism is a thing of the past, and I'm gonna try to help a bit with the future!

Since I knew where I'd be serving, I brought two canvas shopping bags with me to Bulgaria, and of course my super reusable, steel water bottle! This was mostly to appease my own personal constitution, but I'm finding that being under a microscope as an exotic guy in a foreign land, I'm having an unexpected impact on the folks around me. So I decided to roll with it!

I pulled information from my favorite organizations from back home like the Surfrider Foundation, Heal the Bay, Oregon Ban the Bag, Take Back the Tap, and the Story of Stuff to create a rough presentation for my colleagues. I told them about the evils of disposable plastic products and showed them mind blowing pictures. I quoted numbers, cited myself, and assured them all that I was very smart. It was a moving presentation and it actually inspired a discussion. I was surprised and very pleased. It looks like my remaining time will be spent helping to develop this idea into something the library can use in their effort to go green!I'm getting an excited and very interested response from my colleagues, which is great, but there's a lot more people in this town and breaking their old ways will be a very difficult thing to do! I'm going to try hard to find a source of reusable bags and water bottles for this community, but I don't know how realistic that will be yet. Sure, I'll take your suggestions, if you have any.

We celebrated at the end of the day because aside from being Andrew's Presentation Day, it was also Wine Day! Well, I guess Wine Day's actual date is still debatable. I'm told it's either February 1st or February 14th, depending on which calendar you use. I think this is just an excuse to celebrate a great holiday twice. Fine by me!