It’s so easy to denounce plastic shopping bags. They start to tear before you’ve finished filling them. They’re a waste of the oil used in their manufacture. They wind up in landfills by the millions, or floating along roadsides, or in the stomachs of marine mammals.
Some cities have proposed or enacted grocery-bag fees to discourage use. Other municipalities (and countries) have banned them outright.
Eventually plastic bags will no longer be a fixture in our lives. And I’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Wait! Don’t send the green squad over to tie a shopping sack over my head! I’m as dismayed by the waste of petroleum and the ubiquitous litter as anyone else. That scene from “American Beauty” of the plastic bag dancing in the wind was cute – but the moviemakers didn’t address the fact that the bag had to come down sometime.
What I’ll miss is all those free trash bags. I generate very little trash – Seattle recycles even food waste – so I have no need for a big garbage can. The small one I picked up at the dollar store is just the right size to be filled by a plastic shopping sack.
It won’t break the bank once I have to start buying trashcan liners. But, um, won’t they be made of plastic, too?
Some scary stats
With the rising cost of gasoline and other oil-related products, and especially in light of the ongoing Gulf spill trauma, it behooves us to use fewer bags. The environmental price we pay is a steep one, according to a website called ReusableBags.com:
- The modern world uses more than 500 billion plastic bags each year.
- According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually. (It takes approximately 12 million barrels of oil to make them.)
- Untold numbers of sea turtles, whales and other animals eat plastic bags and die.
- Plastic bags break down into smaller and smaller toxic bits, contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food chain when animals accidentally ingest them. Single-use HDPE bags will “persist on our planet” for up to one thousand years.
- According to a marine scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, plastic bags are dispersed throughout Antarctic waters.
- An industry publication called Modern Plastics reported that Taiwan once went through 20 billion bags a year, or 900 per person. Last year Taiwan banned plastic bags and utensils.
Scary stuff. But be honest: I bet some of you will also miss this versatile, disposable resource.
The lowly shopping bag carries your good shoes in the winter. It cushions fragile materials for mailing. And one day all you dog owners are going to have to buy poop bags.
Some believe that plastic bags are hard to eliminate entirely. For example, Seattle is a city that wants desperately to be green. Yet a proposed bag ban excluded certain small businesses. The measure failed at the polls, but I bet future iterations will also have exclusions.
So maybe I’ll have my trashcan liners a bit longer.
Reduce, reuse – and fly kites?
For the past few years I’ve drastically cut my plastic bag use. Currently I own half a dozen reusable shopping sacks, all obtained for free from sources like street fairs and supermarket promotions.
Well, except for the bag I bought for one cent at a university’s lost-and-found sale. (Worth every penny I paid!)
I keep at least one of these folded up in my backpack at all times. It comes in handy if, say, I find an unadvertised special.
There are other ways to deal with residual plastics, according to Myscha Theriault of Wise Bread. In her essay, “The plastic bag dilemma: Seven strategies for coping,” she suggested, among other things:
- Stuffing accent pillows or curtain valances
- Using bags as faux painting tools
- Turning them into kites (which takes the “American Beauty” thing a step further)
Theriault also suggests keeping a tally, right on the bag, of how many times it gets used before finally giving up the ghost. At which point, I suppose, you could use it as packing material.
If your city doesn’t have a mandatory recycling program, check supermarkets and department stores for recycling bins. Bags may also be welcome at food banks or charity thrift shops, so ask around.
Just don’t take them outside and expect them to dance. Real life isn’t a movie.