Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Mark Evans asks why nobody has come up with a biodegradeable grocery bag:

You figure with all the “green” technology being developed, someone would come up with a bio-degradeable plastic bag, and that large grocery retailers would champion their use. It’s good to see more businesses become more environmentally-conscious but there’s so much more they could do.

Shopping at home in Boston the standard question by the cashier was "paper or plastic?"and you had your choice of either type of bag at no additional cost. We most often used paper. That same choice is never offered in Canada, though many stores will sell you reusable bags, which you then have to bring back to the store with you.

Now we do reuse our plastic bags for storage and other things, but there comes a point where you can't reuse them all. Often when buying one or two items I won't even use a bag. But the choice of a paper bag would be nice.

For all the talk of conservartion in Canada, it seems that there isn't actually much actually being practiced. At my local Home Depot in Nashua, NH, there was an entire aisle of water-saving gadgets for taps and toilets and things - flow restrictors, dams, and things like that. When I moved to Canada there was nothing like that at all.

The same goes for compact fluorescent bulbs. In the United States there are indoor and outdoor bulbs, as well as bug lights, spotlights, floodlights, and numerous colors. Yet in Canada there just seem to be the standard indoor versions.

This can only suggest to me that there isn't yet a demand for environmentally friendly and conserving devices as there is in other countries. Though perhaps that is starting to change.