Awesome Things To Do In Life #4: Comment card like you mean it

This photo depicts several examples of awesome, but the one I want to highlight in the fourth installment of my series on Awesome Things To Do In Life is the bag on Katie’s shoulders. Check this out:

This is a reusable bag that the UCSD bookstore now offers for a few dollars. It’s available at all the registers, and store employees ask every customer if they want their books in one of these durable bags instead of doubled up disposable plastic bags. Over the next decade, this will have a measurable impact on the amount of waste generated by the bookstore.

OK, now check this out:

The reason the UCSD bookstore provides these bags is Katie.

She was disgusted by the mountains of book filled plastic bags she saw marching out of the bookstore quarter after quarter, bags which were almost uniformly destined for the trash. So she asked a clerk if she could talk to someone about it, and the clerk told her to fill out a comment card. She wrote a suggestion that they offer reusable bags, like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods to. She didn’t expect a response.

But she got a response, and the store manager asked her to help find examples of programs where her idea had worked, and it took a lot of months, but as of last week, the bags are in the bookstore.

The bags are in the bookstore. Because Katie is the kind of person who says stuff like “let’s fix this.”

Awesome.