Tuesday, November 16, 2010

BAN THE BAGS!
Earlier posts on this blog talked about the bag mania that came in around 2007 when the Anya Hindmarch bags, made of cotton, were outed as being made in Chinese sweatshops...we then made a plain grey hemp bag which was the real thing, and held them up in protest outside the Hindmarch shop in London. Cotton, being a worldwide destructive monocrop, was used in those and other ecologically deastructiv bags worldwide. Here in New York these trendy bags are being recalled, as such bags, usually made in China, have been found to contain lead. Michael M. Grynbaum writes in yesterday's New York Times that consumers, such as Jen Bluestein, are finding out that it is fraud. Bluestein notes: "Green is a trend and people go with trends...People get them as fashion statements and they have, like, 50 of them. I don't think people know the real facts."
Duh. People don't, and the cotton industry is not letting on. So we now have these dangerous and idiotic bags when we could have had the real thing: Hemp. Plain hemp bags. Grynbaum notes, ironically, that "climate-change-conscious shoppers at one of Manhattan's culinary meccas on Sunday said they were chagrined that yet another good intention had gone awry." Shelley Kempner says "Bummer! We're still not doing the right thing", and asks if we might have to start using string bags. Actually, this is a good idea, less is more; we used these in Istanbul in the 1960s, and they were great. They were also biodegradable. But the problem with them is that no trendy lefty idiot shops get to print their name on them, so they are overlooked. Wholier-than-thou-Foods for instance has a big bag of its own, with its logo on it. But it is not hemp. Oh no, it is ecologically destructive cotton. Bluestein and Kempner were right. So when are we going to get it right?

4 comments:

Carlos said...

It's always the trendy who mess up the facts. Where can one get hemp bags?

Bug said...

Making string bags is the answer...but major companies, include Wholefoods, are in the way of progress.

Josh Davis said...

Kenyan -

I am the Senior Editor for Hemp.com. I'm interested in doing an interview with you regarding your book and the information there in.

Please send me an email on how I can contact you.

Thanks -
joshua1230@gmail.com

Mark Ski said...

If people used hemp bags, we could reduce cotton production and plastic bags. But the press just ignores this...is it any coincidence that everywhere you go the newspaper offices are near the porn shops? I mean, check out NY, the NYT, NY Post and NYDN are all near a major hub of porn shops! How convenient...and the more press you have, the harder the porn - in NY they sell shit, piss, donkey, horse and dog sex just around the corner from the NYT building!
But does anyone from these papers every do a story on hemp? No. There is a reason...