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.
