Paper, Plastic, Your Own or None?
Local food magazine Sauce has an interesting article this month on grocery bags — the old paper or plastic debate. I didn’t bring the issue home with me as I like to leave print items for the next person to read (Sauce is a free monthly found at my grocers and restaurants) —- so I’m working off memory of a quick read of the article as it is not available online.
The writer highlighted the increase in reusable shopping bags available at stores, some made from recycled plastic bags. I have examples from nearly every grocery store in town as well as Soulard Market. Of course the usual issues were covered in piece, petroleum going into plastic bags but paper bags being an even greater consumer of resources. Both have issues breaking down in landfills, with plastic bags taking roughly 1,000 years. Energy on recycling was also covered. Alternatives such as the biodegradable bags made from corn and other natural materials found at Local Harvest Grocery were discussed as well. In particular was the roughly ten cents each one of those bags cost relative to the fraction of a penny the conventional plastic bags cost.
As I said, nearly every angle was covered — including bringing your own bags. The author admitted that, like many people, forgetting to bring your own bag is easy to do. I know I’ve certainly gone into a store without my own bags. But I often do the one thing I didn’t see mentioned in the article — purchase the items and not use a bag at all. Sometimes cashiers are totally baffled that I can manage to carry a few simple items without the aid of plastic bag. The more environmentally aware stores, such as Local Harvest, ask if you’d like a bag. They don’t assume a bag with the only choice being material.
Stores like Shop-N-Save are fine too as they don’t bag for you, although they provide plenty of bags for customers. Sometimes I see customers putting only one to two items per bag — many with their own handles such as a plastic bottle of orange juice. Whole Foods gives you a five cent discount for each bag you bring while Trader Joe’s registers you in a drawing.
Basic grocer Aldi’s has the best concept — if you want a bag you need to buy it. This approach lets customers feel the impact of the cost of bags at each and every purchase. Bags are not free so why should they be free in stores? Many Aldi customers bring in bags to reuse or they grab an empty box from stock (made freely available) to carry items. Do these people have a strong environmental conviction or simply a desire to save some money where they can? I say it is the latter.
Again I try to bring my own bag or simply carry the items sans bag. Admittedly I too sometimes take a plastic bag but I give myself a very good guilt trip afterwards. The trick for me is to place reusable bags in an obvious place so they make it back in my scooter. So when I go into a store I may have forgotten to bring in a bag but I’m usually guaranteed to have a bag in the scooter so I can simply carry the items until I get outside and place them in a bag. With only a few items, I can often just place those in the seat storage and not worry about a bag at all. For those of you driving cars this should be much easier — keep a few bags handy in door pockets or between the seats. The reusable bag left on top the fridge at home is never any good — they need to be convenient. And when possible, skip the bag altogether.
So what does this all have to do with urban planning? Well, landfills and solid waste are a very real issue for cities. And even those all those bags can be recycled, most are not. Those of us in the city have trash service as part of our city taxes while others in the region pay a monthly/quarterly fee for trash — regardless of the amount of waste they generate. But what if we had to pay a fee to dispose of each and every item? Or our trash was based on weight or volume? But even before those plastic bags make it to the landfill they are often litter.
So what is a city to do? Well, earlier this year San Francisco took a big step — they banned plastic bags within the city! From the SF Gate in March 2007:
The city’s Board of Supervisors approved groundbreaking legislation Tuesday to outlaw plastic checkout bags at large supermarkets in about six months and large chain pharmacies in about a year.
The ordinance, sponsored by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, is the first such law in any city in the United States and has been drawing global scrutiny this week.
All over the world there is a movement to ban plastic bags. Critics of the movement indicate this is a step backwards as economics will mean these stores rely on the use of paper bags which take more energy to produce and require cutting down of trees. Just like those that predict doom from smoking bans, the reality will be that people adopt and likely will take up the practice of having reusable bags handy. It won’t happen overnight but we can learn to do without plastic bags. But I’m not holding my breath on the alderman in the City of St. Louis taking such a progressive step.
My wife and I have canvas and cotton bags that we’ve gotten from various places that we re-use. For a long time, we’d forget to bring them. It was just like you mention, we had the bags, but the bags would be at home. It was our 6 year old daughter who came up with the idea to put “bring the grocery bags” at the top of the grocery list. Since we are always writing things on the grocery list at the last minute, we always see ‘bring the grocery bags’ and it reminds us to bring them.
Image over substance – plastic bags take up less space in the landfill than paper bags do. Sending them to the landfill IS the problem, as is all the other packaging that most stuff comes with. The other problem that’s not addressed in SF is the reality that plastic ones blow around a lot more “in the wild” and don’t degrade as easily as paper. The real answer is bring your own and/or to refuse the cashier’s offer. One local StL/MO peculiarity is that liquor is required, by law, to be in a bag before it can leave a store . . .
The comment “if you want {it} you need to buy it” is applicable to car parking lots too. The public here has been led to believe that parking is free which isn’t true. The price is embedded in the products the public buys whether or not a parking space is utilized. As such, the cost of parking is highly subsidized and thus we have an overabundance of it.
Canvas bags in the back of the car…but in the fall I ask for paper because I use it as underlayment in the raised bed garden. Right now I have a closet full. I use those pesky suburban journals too. I also pack my own bags in the event I get paper, and especially when I bring canvas–I can put a lot more in those bags than baggers usually will try, probably out of fear that they will break or a customer will complain about the weight.
The bag question is an interesting one. Personally, I prefer paper bags when I can get them because they usually hold more than plastic bags, but many stores now (not as much in the St. Louis region because Dierbergs and Schnucks still have paper bags) just don’t carry paper bags, so I have no choice in the matter.
I too have found much confusion on the part of high school and early college grocery store workers when I purchase just 2 or 3 items and point out that I don’t need a bag.
Costco, which does not carry bags but does leave their excess cardboard boxes lying out, is an interesting packaging model to consider. What if more stores used their excess cardboard boxes and allowed people to pack their groceries in those? Seems pretty efficient to me.
The finally point is the Aldi model, which is pretty common in Europe. When staying in Berlin recently, I went and grabbed some food at the grocery store and paid for a bag on my way out to carry the stuff home in. While the load was not really large enough to justify bagging, I purchased the bag anyway because the plastic bag was high-quality and heavy duty; such bags are always useful on vacations. Given how flimsy most US grocery store plastic bags are, I wonder how many people would be willing to pay for bags if it meant an increase in the durablity of the bags.
Can anyone recommend a store at which to purchase reusable canvas grocery bags?
Then there are places like Sam’s Club which, while surrounded by oceans of parking, don’t even have grocery bags available at all. Interesting how if grocery bags aren’t offered, nobody begrudges their unavailability.
I always feed bad about asking for plastic bags rather than bringing our own, but we reuse them to pick up after the dogs on our walks. Guess it’s time to invest in a pooper scooper that is easy to cary along.
Also, the Dierbergs that I frequent has a repository for used plastic bags to be recycled. We return the bags with holes in the to be recycled. The ones without holes are used to pick up poop when we walk the dog. Of course, those do end up in landfills, but I’m not sure if there are other options out there…
The paper bags at Trader Joe’s are awesome in that they are large and sturdy. Even when I have a full cart there, I’ve never left with more than two bags. We reuse those for carting our magazines to the recycling dumpsters at the nearby school.
If you recycle all the bags you get when making purchases, which is better, paper or plastic? I reuse the paper bags to store all my junk mail in them before taking it all to be recycled. I reuse the plastic bags, mostly for taking lunches to work. Ultimately I’m sure its better to buy a longer lasting bag.
The slogan: reduce, reuse, recycle. Is reduce meant to reduce the amount you consume, or to compact your containers before taking them to the recycling dumpsters? Stupid question I’m sure, but my wife and I argued about it once.
The other day the cashier at Petsmart double-bagged my single bag of cat food while I was swiping my credit card. I took the cat food out of the bags because they were unnecessary. He then put the plastic bags in his trash can under the counter instead of using them for the next customer…
I worked in grocery stores as a teenager and can provide some perspective. The reason the store clerks are ‘confused’ when you don’t want a bag is because they generally spend a lot of time getting yelled at by crabby people that want lots of bags. A common scenario is older (60+ in years) women that complain the bags are too heavy and ask for them to be packed “one item per bag” which means 30 bags if they purchase 30 items! It’s ridiculous!…………………………………………………………..The best solution is for people to use re-useable bags, or if using the paper or plastic bags from the store then load them up full and use fewer bags.
I admit that I use the disposable plastic bags at the checkout (you can call them reusable, but their primary function is single use) I also get my milk in a bag, but I will put other things like cheese or more sturdy items in there since I hate carrying the typically wet handle as it slips out of my hands on the way from the car to the house as I try and carry in my 20 other bags in one trip. I can usually carry them all at once which is helpful to make just one trip from the car to the house so I dont have the leave the kids in the house too long- sometimes they can carry a bag or two also. All of this would not be possible with the paper bags because the do not have handles. Reusable canvas bags are nice if you remember to get them, or a cart on wheels if you walk to the store, but I currently own neither. Besides, I then use the plastic bags for all sorts of things from drop cloths and dirty diapers, to carrying my lunch or wet swimwear. On weekend trips I put my dirty clothes in them to keep it separated from the clean stuff I inevitably take with me and never wear.
One thing I will say finally about Sams and Cardboard boxes. I really wish you COULD buy bags there- not the cold bags either, but regular bags, or even nicer cardboard boxes. the issue I have with the tossed out cardboard boxes is that while its nice to recycle, bringing them into your house may introduce roaches who love the corrugations that only cardboard can offer.
Jason
I use plastic but I don’t throw them away. I have a drawer full of them which dates back about 2 years. When it is full there shall be recycling.
Two things:
Back when the grocery bags were only paper, we didn’t have them stuck in trees all over town. My sister said she wanted to move to Florida because of the Spanish moss in trees–we claimed she should be happy with the grocery bags in trees here.
I saw a plastic-bag recycling receptacle at a Schnucks, and the can had a “Trex” logo on it. I’m assuming here that the Trex composite/modified/plastic/faux wood/whatever decking company is paying for the receptacle and the pickup, so people’s returned bags are becoming other people’s decks? If so, seems like a great idea in that it recycles and relieves the merchant of having to arrange getting the bags to a recycling outfit.
when I do use the plastic, I save them and like many people in the neighborhood take them to the nearby dog park and hook them on the fence for re-use, yes they end up in the landfill, but it keeps dog poop off our feet.
I usu. carry a knapsack anyway and even though I put it on the counter and open it I have to constantly repeat “no bag thanks”. after 7+ years a couple of merchants have become used to the idea.
Regarding dog bags: We buy biobags, which are made of corn (and can be gotten at home eco, and maybe local harvest, and certainly in bulk online). Granted, you do have to pay for them, but they also degrade. Some of the other “biodegradable” dog bags actually do contain regular plastic, meaning they do not fully break down over time.
And regarding plastic bags: I live downwind from the South Grand Schnucks, and in addition to the plethora of food waste that I find myself picking up (oh Doritos bags, you are the scourge of my existance), I see a LOT of plastic bags on the street. The baggers unnecessarily double bag there, and look at me like I have two heads when I toss the canvas bags on the checkout.
Thanks for this post Steve, and thanks to Sauce for covering such an important topic. This is a subject I have been thinking a lot about recently, not just my own use of bags but rather how to create an atmoshere in which we all use fewer throw away bags. My feeling is that people should either have to pay for the bags or get a discount when bringing thier own bag. I also think the cost should reflect not only the manufacturing and distribution of the bag minus any subsidies, but also the environmental impact and cleaning up of the bags. A cost or discount far greater then 5 cents a bag would be ideal.
I bring bags most of the time, but once a month I take plastic and then use them as pooper scooper bags, but this has made me start thinking about pooper scooping. The biodegradable bags seem expensive and if they get too wet while I’m walking they seem to start biodegrading prematurely. Hmm. . . I’ll have to examine my conscience on this one.
Plactic.
And I throw them away.
I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
“SLP — I’m seeing a pattern here. Perhaps we need to ban dogs rather than plastic bags? “
that reminds me of a prank an offshoot of the Billboard Liberation Front http://www.billboardliberation.com/ pulled in SF around ’92. It was amended from “San Francisco – One Neat City!”
to read “San Francisco – One Neat City – Kill Your Dog!”
of course they were just trying to be provocative, but yeah people in that part of town (lower Haight) were fairly irresponsible with their pets.
A really good inexpensive option is the Chico Bag. This thing folds up and attached to you key chain or could be placed in a glove box (even a scooter glovebox or underseat storage compartment. Here’s a link:
http://www.amazon.com/Chico-Bag-Green-Keychain-attachment/dp/B000OOJPJE
I mostly shop at Aldi, and I take boxes. After emptying them, I flatten them and place them in my curbside recycling bin. Which leads me to the problem this creates: Grocery and other big box stores recycle their cardboard. If customers are taking big corrugated boxes instead of a couple of little bags, and are failing to recycle them, as I suspect most are, then using boxes may actually be WORSE for the environment than bags.
I agree with you about putting bags in the scooter … not that I have a scooter, but I have one of those “old lady carts” for the many times that I walk to the grocery store, and keep a good stock of plastic grocery bags in there.
Compostable bags made of potato or corn starch are environmentally more friendly than plastic bags when the compostable bags are composted. Nothing really decomposes in a landfill. Banning plastic bags does nothing if you do not provide composting and enforce it.
Recyclable paper bags are environmentally more friendly than plastic bags when the paper bags are recycled. Again, nothing really decomposes in a landfill. Using paper bags doesn’t help the environment unless recycling is enforced.
To duplicate what SF is doing, St. Louis City would need to provide a composting and recycling system that includes massive re-education, a user-friendly means of recycling, garbage police, fines for offenders, and a court to hear cases. That would take money, money we do not have. We could fund such a program if voters passed an earmarked tax or user fee type measure to pay for it. Interested persons may write up an initiative petition, collect signatures, and ask the voters for their support. Perhaps this is a project for Steve. He has expressed an interest in this issue and he knows aldermen won’t move on it. He has lots of energy. He has a following. He seems to be down in the dumps these days about the City and perhaps this is the sort of proactive approach to a problem that will lift his spirits.
Plastic gorcery bags are not as bad for the landfill as paper bags because plastic grocery bags compact easier, take up less space, they are produced thinner and thinner every year. A plastic bag of today takes us less space in a landfill than a plastic bag two decades ago. The problem is that people use more plastic grocery bags today than they did two decades ago.
The bigger problem not taken up by SF, and which would not be covered by a similar law for St. Louis, is the proliferation of plastic food bags, Ziplocs and such. If you’re using a tote bag to buy a box of baggies, you’re not really helping out Mother Earth.
Plastic bags are a worse problem on the coasts than here because of the damage to the coastal acquatic ecosystems.
One of the fastest growing waste problems has nothing to do with plastics, animal waste from industrial farming and pets.
We walk to our nabe recycling center twice a week and take most of our paper/cardboard, plastics, glass, etc. there. The beer and soda cans go in a bag to be hung off the dumpster for Can Man to collect and take in for the cash. Bubble wrap from deliveries is reused for sending gifts. There’s a small compost container in the kitchen. But most of our food waste goes through the garbage disposal. We think this is better than the dumpster because then we’re not feeding the feral cats who get into dumpsters. If they’re not hungry, they’re not keeping down the rat and tree rat population. Coffee grounds are used for gardening by ourselves and neighbors. Edibles rarely go to waste in the fridge, get wrapped up and given to neighbors or work colleagues instead. Leftover bone treats sometimes go to a big dog on our block with approval of his owner. We really don’t landfill very much. It’s a lifestyle choice, like unplugging appliances instead of just turning them off and walking where we can. On the other hand, we own and use a lot of appliances and electronics, we like air conditioning a lot, drive to Whole Foods for goodies instead of taking the two hour plus roundtrip on public transit, travel by airplanes instead of Amtrak, we eat red meat, bake with lard, it’s not like we’re living like Ed Begley Jr.
If I need a bag I don’t mind a plastic one. I reuse them to throw out junk mail or anything else. Honestly, I’ll take bag and recycling issue more seriously when we get all residents to comprehend yard waste and non yard waste or even not to throw trash on the sidewalk
There was a recycling survey for St. Louis (both internet and phone) but after a quick Google search, it seems to be over. Reading in to their questions, they seemed to be looking for support for a city wide, dumpster based, single streem recycling system for the city. The concept would be that they would pick up trash once per week and recycling once per week. Also, it would be required and enforced, at least to the extent the yard waste is. I don’t know about everywhere, but in my neighborhood people generally do follow the yard waste requirements.
We just started single stream (everything in one container) recycling at my office building downtown. When we questioned the cost of their sorting vs. us separting at least paper from containers, they said that the added volume of recyclables they get w/ single stream over separated more than makes up for the cost of sorting.
To the best of my knowledge, the survey was never available online. After the city posted a notice about it on its homepage, I kept checking the link but there was no online survey. An online recycling survey is about as useful as any other online survey, entertaining and that’s all.
No matter the signage, some people will use dumpsters as they please. It’s not like you can fine property owners. Pick-up trucks cruise the alleys looking for dumpster space.
Then there’s the idiots who think yard waste dumpsters are the place to dispose of pet waste, which they think is just like cow and horse manure and a great addition to the city’s compost mix.
“To the best of my knowledge, the survey was never available online.”
.
i took the online survey. so it was. online, that is.
Let me start by saying I have never bought trash bags in my entire life! And I am 46. I always use the plastic bags from the grocery to put my garbage in. I figure if they are good enough to haul the stuff home in they are good enough to haul out the garbage generated by it. They don’t hold much, but I am just one person so it works fine. I recycle everything but garbage anyway. As for carrying groceries most of my regular shopping is done at Aldi’s and I have a couple of their big plastic bags with handles that I have been using for about two years. I cannot believe the enduring strenghth of those handles! I have reinforced the bags bottoms with some heavy duty packaging tape. When I need items that Aldi’s doesn’t carry I go to Shop-N-Save and always take double bags so I have them for garbage.
Like Aldi, plastic bags aren’t free at Schnuck’s or Shop-N-Save or any grocer, and to imply such is disingenuous. We all pay for them, as they are part of the price of our goods, just like employee salaries, utilities, cost of transport, etc. So, if you DON’T take a plastic bag or two when you purchase anything at a Schnuck’s you are ripping yourself off… *wink-wink* *nudge-nudge*
Forgot to mention in my first comment that I live in the city and have a dumpster, so I am able to use the small grocery bags for trash instead of the big trash bags.
and we shouldn’t forget there is also an enviromental impact BEFORE we choose which bag to use in the store. Plastic bags are petroleum products; paper bags are made from virgin pulp (reportedly 14 million trees were cut down in 1999 to make the paper bags we used in the us). The production and transport of both bags is terrible for the environment. As for recycling; the wall street journal reports that 10-15% of paper bags are recycled while only 1-3% of plastic bags are.
A solution? In March 2002, Ireland introduced a PlasTax to reduce the use of plastic shopping bags. In just the first 3 months of becoming law, the tax raised $3.45M USD and cut use of plastic bags by 90%.
As a side note, I think it was the sauce article that said a polar bear that died recently in the stl zoo had a plastic bag in it’s stomach.
reusing cloth bags is the answer!
Whenever possible, I try to use my JP Monkey reusable shopping bags for groceries and general shopping. If I forget them, I first try to reuse the paper or plastic, or recycle as a last resort. It makes me feel guilty to be seen with a disposable bag!
RELATED: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-water11oct11,1,4983002.story?track=rss
Took my IKEA bag (the blue ones they sell next to their checkout stands) to Dierberg’s tonight -what would’ve been a dozen or so plastic ones was replaced with one big reusable one with handles (it was heavy, though) . . .