OK, OK, this has little to do with chess (although you have to carry your chess sets around, too). Anyway, today is blog action day - the day when thousands of blogs unite and write about our environment. Yes, first and foremost, it is about OUR environment, not mine, not yours, but ours because we all have to share it and live in it together, whether we want it or not. There are many small things we can do to reduce our impact on the environment. For instance, we could tell our significant others not to let the motor idle when they are waiting for us while we are browsing through the latest chess books in the book store. Easy, huh? Anyway, let's be a bit more serious and talk about something everybody can do with little extra work that would have an enormous positive effect: skip using plastic bags.

What is the problem? Everybody who shops for goceries in a US supermarket receives free plastic bags to carry the groceries home. Even better, at most places a friendly (or grumpy) clerk will readily bag or even double-bag your stuff. If you were brought up in a frugal household like me, you probably do not throw these bags in the trash after you come home but collect them for some mysterious future purpose. Sure, there are many uses, for instance as trash bags. However, even a two-person household like mine with only one weekly trip to the supermarket and heavy re-use collects literally whole closets full of plastic bags in a few months. In the bigger picture, the US consumer uses about 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) plastic bags every year! That is roughly a bag a day for every US American!

Photo by zen

So, what can I/you do about this? Here a a few suggestions:

1. Simply don't take plastic bags whenever possible. Do you really need a bag for picking up the painkiller package from the drug store after blundering the chess club championship away? Why do people need bags to carry one or two small items out of the store? I don't know why the bags should be useful but after seeing the look in the face of many store clerks after I refuse to take a plastic bag I can understand why so many people take them. From the expression in some cashier's faces I almost feel like I insulted their mom or something when I say "no bag, please". So join me and just say no to the bags you don't really need and may be sometime the store clerks will start smiling again!
2. After making a few bag-less trips to the convenience store, you are ready to graduate to the next level of plastic bag-less life and try the supermarket. If you are like me and try to shop for food only once a week, you will need something to carry your stuff out of the store, though. If you drive to the supermarket with your car, what about getting one of those collapsible plastic boxes and put it in the trunk? Putting your groceries in one of those even saves you time compared to run back and forth from the car to your fridge with all those useless smallish plastic bags! Just take it with you in the store and tell the guy at the cashiers to put everything in the box instead of in bags.
3. Finally, if you are lucky enough to live close to the supermarket like me, you can easily do the weekly grocery shopping by walking to the store and carrying your food home in a backpack and/or some sturdy cotton bags. I used to haul plastic bags around (I don't have a car) and after switching to two cotton bags instead of a dozen plastic bags never wanted to go back to plastic - the better handles of the cotton bags make them so much easier to carry that I simply do not want to miss them any more.

Additional reading:

• Reusablebags.com - more detailed information on the topic and sells sturdy bags.
• Tips to live without plastic bags.
• Paper vs. plastic - environmental impact.

Comments (9)

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written by Atomic Patzer, October 15, 2007

Sciurus,

I'm with you on this issue. I believe these plastic bags are terrible and should be banned. Paper sacks were so much better. My supermarket doesn't even have that option. But they do sell re-usable bags. I'll have to look into those.

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written by Sciurus, October 15, 2007

In contrast to common thinking (including my own), paper bags are apparently not better than plastic bags. Although the recycling rate of paper bags is higher than for plastic, they need a lot of energy and chemicals for production and recycling. There is more info on that topic here.

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written by Trooper, October 17, 2007

I agree that plastic bags are very wasteful, and if you try to save them, they start taking up a lot of space. I think I might just try looking for a couple of good bags I could use to at least eliminate a couple of the bags we buy every week. And when I say buy, I mean the 4 cents Superstore charges each. The other stores don't, but that's what you pay because Superstore has cheaper prices... oh well.

Thanks for the post, and you even got a bit of chess in there too.

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written by Sciurus, October 17, 2007

Trooper-
if you start saving a few bags then I guess it was already worth writing this post. I actually think that charging for bags would be a good start. It would make people think about the cost of the bags (both direct and indirect in form of the environmental impact) and they would not be considered as one-way item any more. Their lifetime in the landfills is simply too long for that.

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written by likesforests, October 18, 2007

"The estimated annual costs are 4 billion US dollars just for making these bags."

$10 per person per year

"So the next 50 generations of your family will have to live with your plastic bags."

Luckily, no one in my family lives in a landfill!

"Even worse, many bags never reach the landfills"

Grrr... litterbugs also make roads and parks look trashy.

"After making a few bag-less trips to the convenience store"

In some areas, you can pay a modest fee to have groceries delivered to your door. No lines, no carrying, and no wasted plastic bags. That's my strategy.

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written by Sciurus, October 18, 2007

Likesforests:

Good strategy! I tried this once and even though it was convenient the groceries were carried into my door in bags. So you are lucky to have such a good service.

I can see that $10 per person is not really much but I don't understand the argument that "nobody lives in a landfill" - after all you probably wouldn't want a well liked forest converted to a landfill, right

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written by Loomis, November 01, 2007

I totally agree with you about doing all the little things we can to treat our environment better. And you're absolutely right that plastic bags are unnecessary.

However, I would like to change one of your numbers into something more understandable. You say the US uses 100,000,000,000 bags per year. This looks huge when you write it this way. But the volume of all these bags together is only 13 cubic meters. That's right, you could take your 100 billion bags and put them into one room -- a large room, but you've been in rooms this size, it's smaller than, say, a ballroom at a hotel.

In addition to the plastic bags at the grocery store, think of all your groceries that are wrapped in something that you just throw away. The loaf of bread that come in a plastic bag, the individually wrapped cheese slices, the carton of milk, the egg carton, etc. A lot of this can be recycled, but you've probably got more trash in the bags than the bags themselves.

I would love to cut down on trash in the US, I think it's disrespectful how much trash we produce. But you have to know what all the numbers mean, and in addition to doing the little things, we should be trying to do the things that will have the biggest impact.

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written by Sciurus, November 01, 2007

Loomis:
thanks for the insightful comment on the bag volume - admittedly the compression ratio of my closet is far below par, making them appear much bigger

I also agree with you that the packaging of the individual items is a much bigger problem. I even believe there is a pretty bad tendency there (I have no data to support this, though): More and more I see items such as salad or deli meat packaged in sturdy plastic containers that in my mind qualify for bomb-proof storage instead of using much more simple plastic foil. What for? I could reuse these packaging, but let's face it, I don't need a new lunchbox every week. For my part, I simply refuse to buy that stuff.

As for the choice of topic for the post: I think that reducing the amount of plastic bags used is a relatively easy thing to do, so I figured it might be a good thing to start with.

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written by Loomis, November 02, 2007

I think that reducing the amount of plastic bags used is a relatively easy thing to do, so I figured it might be a good thing to start with.

On this I completely agree with you. It's a big problem, and plastic bags may be only a part of it, but it's a part that most people participate in unnecessarily. There's really no extra effort or lower quality of life if you stop using the plastic bags.

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