Great Lakes Green Pages

It has been over a year since I brought a plastic bag into the house, I think. It started out kind of difficult. I often forgot the reusable bags in the car or the house. Then I took on a new strategy. I store all the reusable bags in the trunk of the car. If I ever stop somewhere and forget to take one in, I simply ask not to give me a bag and I bag my own in the actual trunk. It took a little while, but I have completely adjusted and no paper, no plastic. It has gotten me to think hard on the daily down and dirty of bags, plastics, packaging and waste. I started with just 3 reusable bags and a giant sack of plastic bags left over from the store. I now have a host a bags, and I have never purchased a single one. But before i began my quest to eliminate plastic bags from my life, I often had the discussion of which is better, paper or plastic? Plastic is bad, but paper requires trees and energy, so not a perfect solution. One of the blogs I read is called Tomato Talk and is a part of the Earth Fare Supermarket chain website.

Earth Fare just announced that we’re eliminating plastic bags from our stores.

And, many of you have responded to this with, “Why plastic bags and not paper bags?” Here at Earth Fare, we know that the paper versus plastic debate is bound to rage on for many years to come. But, we felt like we needed to take a stand.

So, here’s why Earth Fare has decided to boot plastic over its paper counterparts.

1.) Plastic bags can take over 1,000 years to biodegrade. Paper only takes two to three weeks to biodegrade in a warm landfill.

2.) Only 13% of plastic bags are ever recycled. OVER 56% of paper bags are reused or recycled.

3.) Plastic bags are made of petroleum and natural gas, both NON-renewable resources. Like plastic bags, paper bags do require energy in production. But, two-thirds of that energy is RENEWABLE ENERGY. Creating paper bags is a carbon neutral process

4.) Don’t be fooled. Paper is a renewable resource! The Society of American Foresters have reported that there are more trees now that there was 100 years ago. The paper and forest products industries plant more than three times the number of trees that they harvest.

Finally, and most importantly, paper bags are safer for animals than plastic bags. How often have you heard of a wild animal getting caught in a paper bag or dying from eating one? NEVER. But, this is exactly what happens when plastic bags get picked up by wildlife, especially birds and marine wildlife. They eat it. They feed it to their young. They die from it.

Even better of course is to spend a little cash and pick up a reusable bag next time you go shopping. My first bags are still going strong and I got them in the summer of 2007. And having worked in a grocery store, I can tell you, I pack them FULL!

The great bag debate has been going on for sometime. In some areas of the world plastic shopping bags are banned. In others, there is a nickel charge for a bag. What good is a nickel? Quite a lot apparently. When you give a nickel discount for each bag you bring in you see a lot more reused bags of all sorts. But when you make it a mandatory charge for each bag, then you you will really see behavior change. I am constantly amazed by the poor quality of bags and bagging services in this part of the country. In Oregon, the bags were of better quality and many stores used photo degradable bags, bags that broke down in the sun, so the errant bag caught in a tree or whirling around the freeway would break down on their own. Still, cashiers, baggers and consumers were all conscious of how much each bag could hold and were trained to fill each bag to its proper capacity. Shopping at most any Cleveland area grocery store and you are likely to receive a separate bag for eggs, as separate bag for bread, a limit of about 4 jars or cans to a bag (and often double bagged at that), and your milk-that comes in a jug with its own handle-will get a double bag as well. I insisted on bagging my own groceries, as I was been overwhelmed by a sea of plastic bags. Cashiers used to insist that their bags were just not very strong. I tried the “if you told the manager to buy better bags you would use less” comment more than once, but finally got tired of the blank stare from dead eyes that said, “whatever, weirdo.”

It is apparent that it is up to consumers to make the right moves, and if we do not, then legislature will have to do it for us. In Washington DC, a 5 cent bag tax was implemented on all plastic bags. That means grocery, hardware, drug stores-even restaurants like Subway started adding a nickel to every purchase that used a bag. That means that every time you shop there, you are confronted with your own use, your own waste, and a decision that goes right to your pocket. The result? Consumers hate taxes and will do anything to avoid them. In DC, stores averaged about 22 1/2 MILLION plastic bags a month-each and every month. Enter the New Year’s Bag Tax, and in just short month, bag usage went gone down to a mere 3 million. If these results stay static, then this legislation means that the DC area could reduce the waste of its city by over 230 million plastic bags. What about all those nickels that are collected? That tax is earmarked for environmental causes, starting with the clean up of the DC rivers. By these numbers that is 36 million dollars to be used by those most polluting the environment to clean it up. Sounds fair to me.

What will it take for you to eliminate YOUR plastic bags.