More Ski Towns Join the Telluride Challenge

Isn’t it exciting when towns actually get positive and proactive about eco-awareness? We’ve reported a couple of times before on the friendly ski town reusable bag competition going on between Telluride and Aspen, but things over there just keep getting better. According to Vail Daily, three more towns have joined the challenge to save the most plastic bags by September.

Avon, Gypsum and Eagle also have joined a few dozen other ski towns in the “Plastic Bag Reduction Challenge,” which runs from March 1 to Sept. 1. The towns, community groups and stores will pass out reusable bags. The winner gets a grant from Alpine Bank to install solar panels on a local school.

The knock on plastic bags, of course, is that they are generally used once and then sent to the landfill, where they disintegrate into tinier and tinier particles over the next 2 million or so centuries.

Bringing cloth grocery bags to the supermarket, then, is a pretty painless way to change our behavior on behalf of our children, our children’s children, our children’s children’s children and so on.

The article goes on to stress a very important note: despite the hype and excitement through the duration of the challenge, this should be a habit-forming endeavor — a practice that should last long after summer has faded and the winners have been announced.

Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 3:07 pm and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.