A Single Step — paper or plastic?
Ah, the age old question — paper or plastic?
Today’s newspaper contains an article with the following lead: “The Boston City Council wants to ban the use of plastic shopping bags at supermarkets, pharmacies, and convenience stores in the city, saying the ubiquitous bags are a hazard to the environment and a maddening blight of the landscape.”
The article continues with pros and cons for both types of bags. I’ve long suspected that plastic is cheaper and easier for stores to handle and that stores just erroneously claim that paper and plastic have an equivalent impact on the environment.
I find that although I usually ask for paper (which I suspect has less environmental impact than plastic), we end up with a fair pile of plastic bags. We actually reuse the plastic bags for our daily cat litter scooping; they are a precious commodity in this house. We use the paper bags to hold other paper that we end up recycling. This summer, we’ll also be delivering a pile of paper bags to a farm so that they can bundle their vegetables.
Even better than these two solutions would be to bring my own canvas and string bags, but I’m terrible at remembering to carry them around. The permanent bags sit in my car trunk until they rot and then I throw them out — not a very effective solution.
So how have you approached this every-day dilemna? How do you make the solution easy for yourself?
on April 26th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Honestly, one of the ways I make this issue easy for myself is I sidestep it whenever I can. Cashiers are programmed to bag everything, even when it’s completely unnecessary. If I’m buying a small number of items that I can easily carry to my car without a bag, I tell the cashier that I don’t need one. I sometimes get funny looks, but I think that has more to do with my interfering with the normal procedure.
It doesn’t solve the dilemma of how to answer the question at the grocery store, but I make enough little trips for things like the toilet paper we evidently overuse that it does make a difference.
on April 27th, 2007 at 4:44 am
This is a non-issue. Bringing your own bags could also be environmentally damaging. Most people leave these in their car permanently so that they don’t forget them when they go shopping. Hust think of the thousands of tons of extra weight we would be carrying around collectively every time we use our cars if everyone were to switch to these bags.
They also slow down the checkout queues, costing more in time and labour - adding to prices indirectly.
Shopping bags are a non-issue!
Gerard, Sydney, Australia
on April 27th, 2007 at 8:30 am
[J]ust think of the thousands of tons of extra weight we would be carrying around collectively every time we use our cars if everyone were to switch to these bags..
Which is why we need hoverjets that run on pixie dust!
/sarcasm
on April 27th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
No fair! My hoverjet only runs on flubber!