Inconveniencing the consumer is ideal for those who believe the planet will be saved if they carry reusable shopping bags from their e-bike into their store which was built on former pristine lands of trees, green undergrowth and wildlife which has since been replaced by urban sprawl, pavement, and holier-than-thou types carrying cloth bags.
A half-dozen five-year-old cloth shopping bags accomplishes one thing well. It makes one feel so superior to those mystified when looking at pallets coming in the grocery store’s back door. Those pallets are wrapped in reems of foot-wide plastic to secure one-time use plastic bottles of shampoo and wood glue and plastic bags of walnuts and pecans and one-time use tin cans of every food item you can name. Eery manner of store shelf item that isn’t contained in plastic is secured in a plastic bubble you pry the item from once bought.
The issue isn’t making the planet green. The issue is the newly green consumer who feels such disdain for those who actually want the store to supply a bag. The baggies, according to these types, are destroying the planet.
We aren’t. We just prefer not to carry our groceries to our SUV’s in our arms.
Plastic shopping bags are not one-use bags. They are used for household garbage, for securing and storing, and are ideal for the task. They are reused.
Some who have been to Europe and been impressed with how much more progressive the Europeans are compared to North Americans with shopping bag use like the adoption.
Well, here’s some European data. A 2018 Danish Environmental Protection Agency report suggests a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to offset its environment impact when compared to the traditional supermarket plastic bag that’s reused once as a trash bag and then incinerated. And if that cotton is organic, the figure is an eye-popping 20,000 times. I mean, let’s get serious.
Heavy plastic bags are more status symbol for the newly greens than helpful to the environment.
Litter may be unsightly, but it’s hardly a climate crisis. That’s really what the newly greens hate. Litter.
What’s more, if putting raw chicken in a reusable bag doesn’t turn your stomach enough, try this on. The non-profit Centre for Environmental Health (CEH) found that about 10 per cent of reusable plastic bags it tested contained minute traces of lead. And if the bag featured cartoons from a well-known and well established cartoon factory-not mentioning any names-the lead count was even higher. Add that to your groceries.
A 2008 environmental and Plastic Industry Council of Canada study found mould and bacterial levels and reusable plastic bags was 300 per cent greater than Canadian health standards allow.
A 2010 joint University of Arizona and Limo Loma university study stopped 84 shoppers who agreed to have their resuable bags tested. Well. That study showed 97 per cent of users didn’t wash their reusable shopping bags. That’s as close to 100% as you can get.
That assembled data showed these bags harbour bacteria from repeated exposure to meats and vegetables. How much? Half of the 84 bag studied contained coliform, a bacterium found in faecal matter while 12 per cent tested positive for E. coli.
Ya gotta clean your bag.
I mean, come on. Ever worked in industry? Ever worked in the back of a grocery store? The plastic used and discarded is in the tons per month or week if not per day, depending on the size of the shop. But it’s hidden. The I’m-so-green crowd doesn’t work those jobs. They don’t push over-sized barrows to the outside dumpster or drive heavy commercial trucks to the landfill. They’re bothered by a discarded plastic bag they’ve seen on a roadside on their paved path beside the paved highway they ride on from their apartment to their grocery store that was built on what used to be wild land.
In the early 1970s we volunteered with a cardboard recycling group to reuse discarded cardboard. I was surprised how much was discarded. Back then some of us had, beneath our sink, a box for plastic, a box for glass and a box for paper and cardboard, all to be recycled. It was the age of the Mother Earth Catalog. It was the time of the back-to-the-land movement, the birth of the EPA, the birth of Earth Day, and the realization our planet was finite.
We were laughed at, ridiculed. Eyes rolled.
Back then the same disdain directed toward us was much the same these new green types have for those who just want to carry groceries home in something other than our arms or a cloth bag that we have to use hundreds of times- or even thousands of times- to nullify its effects on the environment that is the equivalent of a single plastic grocery bag.
Did you know the traditional single-use grocery bags can now be made to be biodegradable? Yeah. Completely biodegradable. And it’s being banned.
That makes no sense. Banning a biodegradable plastic bag means there is nothing to the argument for reusable cloth grocery bags.
Leaf Environmental Products of Calgary, Alberta, makes a compostible grocery bag. It lookes like plastic. It breaks down like leaves in the landfill in about a month. The bag contains zero polyethelene. And you can’t have one at a grocery store checkout. It’s banned. By law. In favour of cloth or heavy plastic.
