Posted on 05/20/2009 7:44:01 PM PDT by Shellybenoit
Once again the cure is as bad as the illness. Remember when you went to the grocery store and brought your food home in brown paper bags. Those bags were great, they had so many uses once you brought them home, everything from trick or treating, to trash bags. Throughout my school years every text book I had was covered with one of those brown paper bags. But those bags used paper and the environmentalists wanted to save the rain forests so they switched to those thin plastic bags. The plastic could still be used for Halloween, and are perfect for your wet bathing suits when coming home from the beach. But plastic uses petroleum, takes centuries to decompose, and to be honest, they aren't really strong enough to hold the groceries without tearing, so they had to come with something new. Enter the reusable grocery bags, they are only good for groceries, but it kill trees and will slow the build-up of plastic in the land fills. The only problem is they can make you sick:
(Excerpt) Read more at yidwithlid.blogspot.com ...
Hey, I do the same thing, only I ask for paper AND plastic. You get the strength of paper and the handles on the plastic bags make for easy carrying, & then I use them for trash.
Yup...It isn't 'centuries.'
Shoot me - I live in a university town, take my own bags to the store (they’re thinking about taxing or putting a fee on the plastic bags), and am vegan.
I read the article and some things don’t make sense:
1. There appears to be contaminants in moist cloth bags, ok, but why are they moist? Veggies that might be wet from the sprayer are put in little plastic bags anyway (are they going to do away with those?), so there’s nothing wet in the bags.
2. The bags have fecal matter - wtf? The article mentioned diapers - who the heck is putting dirty diapers in a bag they use for food?
3. Wrap meat so there is no contamination. No problem for me, don’t eat meat. Even when I did, of course you wrap meat; it can leak.
I wonder if the dire warnings are in response to uses that aren’t that prevalent for people who use their bags just for grocery shopping?
Just to keep my FReep cred, I use and reuse plastic bags. I don’t want to make others use cloth bags. I don’t pay for my bags, but have a collection of freebies from conferences and events around town where they gave away bags. I used the tax on plastic debate in one of my classes and had to ‘help’ students understand the concept that freedom extends to which freakin’ bag you use for shopping. I hate the idea that libs decided a few years ago we were all supposed to use paper, and then it was plastic, and now we’re supposed to tote our own damn cloth bags to the store.
I keep the cloth bags in the car and admit to liking that there is no longer a mountain of plastic bags in the pantry waiting to be used or taken to the store for recycling, which I always forgot to do. I hope that using cloth bags doesn’t mean I have to turn in my official glow-in-the-dark FR ID card.
It varies. Here we have just submitted to a no plastic bag regime.
OK I forget right. So I look behind the car seats. Find two bags some months old - no structural integrity left.
And one bag intact and sound, labeled "Biodegradable, will break down in landfill and sunlight". Thing is: producing and labelling that type of bag was a big enviro-friendly marketing campaign about 5+ years ago. Makes you think.
The fact that a cloth bag will eventually cross contaminate its contents is a no-brainer, isn’t it? This is one of the reasons I don’t use them, in addition to the fact that laundering them will only end up using more energy than the plastic ones (although now that I think about it, drying them in the sun would kill bacteria and in the California sun would take about 3 minutes, as opposed to two hours in the dryer)
Some folks might not like it, but that's OK. It works great for me! The regular bags were 99 cents each, and the insulated one was $1.99. I think I've already recouped my original purchase of them, since I've gotten money back each time I've used them for the last 6 months or so.
I always ask for paper. I stockpile them. Two and a bit of kindling start my stove fires every morning and evening.
I like to think of it as recycling.
“Shoot me - I live in a university town, take my own bags to the store (theyre thinking about taxing or putting a fee on the plastic bags), and am vegan.”
IBTZ?
;-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.