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The Iowa Grocery Industry Association is trying to make sure that more plastic bags get recycled, which is a fine goal. You can see why if you drive out into the countryside and look at the white bags scattered everywhere, hanging in the trees, plastered on the fences and rattling in the wind all night long while sleep-deprived cattle try to figure out just how to file a herd-action lawsuit.

It’s time to stop tweeting and do something, because the world clearly has a serious plastic problem. Jared Diamond reported in his book “Collapse” that you can sail to a remote island in the South Pacific, hundreds of miles from even the Gilligan level of civilization, and find the shoreline strewn with plastic objects.

So if you’re still looking for the cap to your ballpoint pen, you might give Diamond a call.

Grocery transport shouldn’t be a baffling problem beyond our comprehension, like health-care reform or left-hand turns. If we can pretend to put a man on the moon (just trying to avoid long, rambling letters from conspiracy theorists), surely we can find a better way to get food home.

When I was a kid, we brought groceries into the house in brown paper sacks, emptied them, placed several folded-up sacks inside another sack and shoved it under the basement stairs. However, I can’t remember what we did with them after that. Now I’m wondering what else we left under the stairs. Was it just a dream, or at one point did I have a younger brother?

Then some showoff, seeking new ways to use petroleum when he should have been playing Frisbee with the rest of the research scientists, invented the plastic bag.

He would spare the kinds of trees that are extremely easy to grow, while creating objects that will still be clogging the environment when the Iowa State University football program wins its first national championship. Well, maybe not that long, but a long time.

As part of my effort to become one with nature – I also produce Vitamin D by absorbing sunlight through the top of my head – I started carrying a canvas bag on trips to the grocery store. It’s easy, and almost as much fun as squeezing the brown sugar while no one is looking.

Admittedly, I’m only in charge of restocking the staples, like Fritos, so it’s not hard to get everything into one bag. The hard part is getting the checkout clerk to notice. I set the big white bag on the left side of the scanner, unload it and plop it down on the right side of the scanner. Then the clerk, like a robot on an assembly line, pulls open a plastic bag and starts to stuff.

Sheesh, I think. Sheesh.

I suspect the typical checkout clerk is working much of the time in a daze, or even a stupor, which is like a daze except you can hear a buzzing sound coming out of their ears. Maybe it would help to hang the bag from the clerk’s neck, but I think that’s a misdemeanor. And those Altoona cops can get pretty rough.

The larger point is, how many canvas bags do you want to lug around with you? My wife is in charge of keeping the family alive – she chose that from a list of household duties; I picked “watch TV” – so she brings home eight or 10 plastic bags at a time. Some of these go into the hall closet, to be used for taking lunch to work or cleaning out the cat’s litter box. No mix-ups so far, at least not that I’ve noticed.

But using them over again doesn’t make them disappear from the environment any faster.

However, there is one way to greatly reduce our use of plastic bags: eat right off the supermarket shelves. Let’s start off by making Monday night pasta night. If you think of it, bring some boiling water.

Contact Jim Pollock at jimpollock@bpcdm.com or by phone at 288-3338, ext. 241.