Grocery Totes
August 11th, 2008
They clog our landfills where they will take perhaps 200 to 1000 years to decompose. An estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion of these ubiquitous items are manufactured worldwide every year.Their production pollutes the environment, making our world more toxic.
No, I am not talking about TV reality shows, but disposable plastic bags, the kind your local supermarket provides , complete with store logo. Once touted as an ecological improvement over paper bags, the consequences of their widespread use, from dependence on dwindling and more costly petroleum resources to their deadly effects on the oceans and marine life, have given many people second thoughts.
Nor is a large scale return to paper bags an earth-friendly solution to this problem. It requires more energy and costs more to produce a paper bag than a plastic one. The manufacture of a paper bag creates considerably more air pollution than making a plastic one. And paper , of course, comes from trees, which help to absorb the excess carbon dioxide produced as a consequence of other human activities, besides being a valuable resource in and of themselves.
Increasingly, consumers are responding to the once current question, “Paper or plastic?” with “Neither”. Reusable grocery bags , once associated only with the more radical tree-huggers or trendy sophisticates, are going mainstream. These grocery totes can be made of many different materials, including cloth(canvas, cotton or cotton mesh) or polypropylene, a non-toxic and recyclable synthetic.
Both the invisible hand of the market and the visible foot of government have responded to the problem of disposable bags. The American retail giant Walmart has been offering inexpensive reusable shopping bags at some of its locations for several years. Some supermarket chains sell their own grocery totes or allow token discounts for customers who bring their own bags to the store. On the other hand, some cities in the United States have assessed a tax, imposed at the checkout, on customers who use the grocery store provided disposable bags. Other localities are considering an outright ban on their use.
Whatever steps are taken by large institutions to save the environment, we must never lose sight of the fact that individuals , acting alone or as a community, have a role to play in keeping the earth “green”. Besides recycling and saving energy, one can contribute to this essential cause by swearing off disposable bags for good and switching to reusables. Keep your grocery totes in the car or by the door so you don’t forget them!
Happy green shopping!