Plastic Bags vs. Cloth Bags
August 6, 2008
Seems like everywhere I turn people are lamenting the impact of the plastic bags available at the grocery store. It’s not that they don’t have good reason to. It’s estimated that we as a global society use nearly one million plastic bags a minute. Besides using 12 million barrels of oil in the US to make those bags, it’s estimated nearly 100,000 marine animals die each year when they mistake plastic bags for food. Whether it’s the statistics or the ‘green’ trend that’s caused a shift, one thing is clear, everyone is jumping on. Nearly every store has reusable bags in their aisles, companies give them away as door prizes, and everyone and their mother are picking up two or three at the checkout.
What has amazed me is that I haven’t heard anyone acknowledge the irony in this. We critique the rampant consumerism and environmental degradation of plastic grocery bags that fill landfills, waste energy, and acknowledge our disposable society, and our answer to that problem: Buy something. Buy a bag, a nice pretty canvas tote with trendy design and take it to the grocery store and show it off.
While we think we’ve done some great act for the environment, we’ve in some ways simply traded one consumable product for another. We need to think more critically about this. We need to raise some questions about our consumerism and think hard about our choices:
1. Is plastic bad? If you think it is and should be used in moderation, then we need to make a serious effort to reduce our use of plastic across the board, not just shopping bags. And may I suggest we do this buy purchasing non-plastic products when it’s necessary to buy something new, but even better, simply buy used.
2. Can you reuse your plastic bags? Since moving out of my parents home I have never spent a dime on trash bags. Instead, we’ve used those dreaded plastic grocery bags as our kitchen, bathroom and other trash can liners. We also used reused them to get our groceries time and again until we accumulated enough cloth bags for our shopping. I use the plastic bags to store dirty cloth diapers when we are on the go. And if we had a dog, I’d be using the bags for clean up there too.
My goal is not to discourage anyone from using cloth bags, but to think more critically about our purchasing and lifestyle, rather then simply following the trends, even if they are ‘green’ trends. Personally, I use cloth bags quite often for groceries. It’s been fun to see the change in attitude in the checkout line at the grocery store. We used to walk to the store with a couple backpacks and a cloth bag and when checking out we’d tell them we were going to bag it ourselves in our own bags and we’d get very strange looks. Now it’s not that big of a deal. We’ve reduced our trash output so much that I don’t need many plastic bags for that anymore either.
If your going to purchase cloth bags make sure they are environmentally friendly and fair trade. And if someone’s got a more creative way to collect trash then plastic trash bags I’d like to hear it.
Ariah Fine lives in North Minneapolis with his beautiful wife and daughter. He is a blogger, community organizer, and author of Giving Up.
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4 Responses to “Plastic Bags vs. Cloth Bags”
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Ariah,
We have done much of the same thing regarding plastic bags in our family, especially using them as trash bags, for dirty diapers on the go, etc. But in those cases, they still end up in the landfill.
We found a place-grocery store- where they will recycle your plastic bags and turn them into usable products, instead of landfilling them. We also finally found a place to recycle nearly everything we were throwing away, so we went from 5-6 bags of trash a week to 1-2 bags.
I’m for finding ways to buy things that aren’t in plastic, but nearly everything liquid is- toiletry products, drinks, etc. I don’t think we can just not buy plastic, but can find ways to greatly reduce!
Great points Ariah. I, too, have jumped on the bandwagon, so to speak and have quit accepting plastic bags and have encouraged my family and friends to do so as well. I have even begun scolding my Momma for her collection of Wal-Mart plastics (another conversation entirely, methinks). I instead, use the blue bags I got at IKEA about a year ago when doing some home shopping there. I even blogged about it in these places . I have exhausted all plastic bags now with trashcan use as you talked about and am now simply using the cans and washing them with warm water and high-concentrate detergent every Saturday morning like clockwork.
It will be hard to minimize plastic as the earlier comment noted, almost everything comes in plastic. I am working on converting my fridge and pantry right now from just buying plastic condiments and such to buying the glass and refilling the initial plastic containers and then recycling the glass. I also found a store around the corner that has agreed to let me bring them up to 25lb. of paper to put in their large paper shredder/recycling bin (that they then have picked up by a private company) per week.
I’ve managed to collect a good number of canvas bags at conferences and conventions. I find them easy to use and way more sturdy than plastic - plus they can be washed when dirty.
with other things it is hard to cut down our plastic consumption. I’ve almost eliminated pop from our diet and get glass juice bottles (the organic stuff usually comes in glass anyway). But still its everywhere.
[…] I’ve had the privilege to start writing occasionally for Creation Care’s new web initiative, Deep Green Conversations. Josh Brown (from that podcast), has been working really hard on this project and I wanted to be sure to give him a shout out. You should check out the new site, where you might find a familiar article by me about plastic bags. […]