Bag Ladies Needed

The key to living a more ecologically sustainable, low-impact lifestyle is the same as any other major lifestyle change: one step at a time. Our family’s main goal – at least for now – is to reduce our waste. We’ve taken some fairly easy steps so far: ditching almost all disposable products such as paper plates, napkins, and even menstrual products in favor of reusable substitutes. We recently started composting as well. But there was one more bad habit we needed to break.

Plastic bags, which are made of polyethylene, are a huge environmental problem. According to the EPA, over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks, and wraps are consumed in the U.S. each year. The bags don’t biodegrade, but instead, they photodegrade – breaking down into smaller and smaller bits that contaminate soil and block waterways. Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags (source: Reusablebags.com).

After my trip to Ireland last summer, I was surprised that the stores didn’t give away plastic bags (and that the restaurants didn’t give away soda, but that’s another post). The country instituted a “PlasTax” in 2002, which encourages shoppers to bring their own reusable bags to the store. The disposable bags are still available, but they cost $0.15 per bag. In May of last year, San Francisco banned non-biodegradable plastic bags from big stores and pharmacies, following the lead of countries such as South Africa, Bangladesh, and Taiwan.

What an excellent solution – like most people I know, I had an enormous collection of plastic bags under the sink waiting to be recycled. So I’ve started bringing my own bags to the store with me (though they aren’t without drawbacks of their own). There’s only one problem with this: most cashiers don’t know how to sack groceries properly. They usually sack them the same way they would with the plastic bags: toss an item or two in the bag, hand it to the customer, repeat. It doesn’t work that way with reusable bags. They are designed to be filled. So I end up with my bread and produce squashed underneath jars of salsa and cans of beans.

I can’t really blame the cashiers. They weren’t hired, or trained, to sack groceries. That occupation – grocery sacker – is quickly going the way of car-wash attendants and shoe-shine boys in my area. At my local Wal-Mart – where I bought most of my reusable bags, BTW – you can’t use them in the self-checkout lanes.

So if stores are going to get on the bandwagon and start encouraging reusable bag use, they should take a tip from Aldi stores and provide a place for customers to bag their own groceries. Either that, or hire some people to sack the groceries for you – heavy stuff on bottom, bread and produce on top.