Jaffrey Riverfest

This is our tent set up for this month’s Jaffrey Riverfest. The decorations draped on the tent are single-use plastic bags. Research has shown that the average family uses an average of 125 single-use bags each month. One of our fabulous JCI members tied together 125 single-use plastic bags and Voila! The tent has been decorated. And fascinating but true NONE of the people who stopped at our tent use that many single-use bags. Nope. Sometimes they use a reusable bag.

I am so relieved. At least, Jaffrey’s 6000+ citizens don’t use 125 single-use bags each month. Even though the JCI plastics group has collected over 10,000 pounds of plastic in the last 15 months. Sent it to Trexx who, in return for 500 pounds of plastic, sends us a free bench. Jaffrey now has 10-ish Trexx benches! Isn’t this a brillant case of willful blindness? We feel good for taking 10,000 pounds of single-use plastic out of the waste stream, Trexx looks good for repurposing it, and the corporations who make these plastics are not responsible for the consequences. How is this solving anything?

A couple of people who stopped at the tent are married to Preppers. They say they have no worries; they are set for the deluge and hell’s fires. They will be fine. I’m glad for them, but do wish that we as a nation will someday again, and soon, return to a sensibility of caring for each other and for the future.

Meantime, the JCI hopes to put in a warrant article this year to ban single-use plastics from Jaffrey. Why not? We don’t use them anyway, right?