I'm beginning to suspect that being a drug dealer may not be as glamorous as Al Pacino made it out to be in Scarface. Sure, there's the money, the cars, and the women but spending hours carefully measuring stuff into plastic baggies is a real pain in the ass. Well, there's the whole 'dying in a hail of bullets' thing to consider too...
Repackaging food is a big part of preparing for a hike for a number of pretty obvious reasons. You can't just lug around a 4 pound box of powdered milk when you only need about 4 cups between resupply. Well, you could, I suppose, but you'd look like a dork and you'd better really like powdered milk because you wouldn't have room in your pack for anything else. Besides taking up space, often the original cardboard packaging would mean carrying extra weight. It doesn't seem like much but it adds up. So that means baggies, lots and lots of baggies. About 150 quart-sized baggies today and I feel like I only made a dent.
The shear volume of plastic baggies one requires for a trip of this magnitude is one of the dark, dirty little secrets of the backpacking world. For the most part the vast majority of the people who hike are a very environmentally conscientious crowd- if you were to brazenly litter in front of a group of thru-hikers you'd probably get strung up from the nearest tree with a short length of all-natural hemp cord- however we all use enough plastic to keep the worlds credit card factories producing for the next decade.
On the other hand I try and reuse my baggies as often as I can and I'm sure many others do as well. Plus maybe I can assuage some of my guilt with the knowledge that since I'll be basically living off the grid for half a year my carbon footprint will be basically zero. Except for all those goddamn baggies that is...
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