In the course of discarding the rinds of a watermelon she'd chopped up for consumption throughout the rest of the week, Polly Parker of Nashville, Tennessee, almost used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse not to reuse a several-year-old plastic grocery bag.
“I know, it seems really lame now,” said Polly of her momentary rationalization that, what with everything going on with the pandemic, lockdown, and unprecedented deterioration of human society, what did it really matter if one more plastic bag fell by the wayside? "What can I say? This quarantine has taken its toll on me."
Fortunately, within just a few hours of her blatant disregard of her own environmental ethics, Polly realized that all was required for her to maintain her theretofore spotless non-plastic-bag-consuming record was to return to the dumpster, retrieve the bag full of watermelon scraps, dump the bare rinds into the bin, and rinse out the perfectly salvageable plastic bag – all of which she did in short order, resulting in slightly grubby hands, but a gratifyingly cleaner conscience.
“In times of great stress, when you’re squeezed really tight, you get to see what comes out," said Polly. “In my case, it was integrity. Thanks to that, one fewer single-use plastic bag will be a coronavirus casualty."
