Posted on 01/26/2008 11:53:56 AM PST by JACKRUSSELL
Eradicating those unsightly plastic bags that hang in trees and clog landfills may not be in the bag just yet but the idea is reaching a fever pitch in Canada and around the world.
On Tuesday, Whole Foods Market, the world's largest natural-food retailer, announced it would stop giving out disposable plastic bags at the checkout counters. All of the retailer's 270 U.S., Canadian and U.K. stores aim to be free of bags by Earth Day on April 22 of this year. And earlier this month China launched a countrywide ban barring shop owners to hand out single-use bags.
Slowly ideas are changing about the need for plastic bags. But could they go the way of the VCR or at the very least become taboo like cigarettes?
"There is a shift in perception," says Tracey Saxby, a 30-year-old environmentalist who lives half of the year in Rossland, B.C., and the other half in Whistler, B.C. "We just don't need them."
Saxby, an Australian native, was one of the first people in North America to champion a ban in her adopted home of Rossland.
About 10 years ago, the budding environmentalist worked in a retail store in Australia, where incidentally the federal environment minister is currently seeking to ban all ultra-thin plastic bags by the end of the year.
She said she would question why she had to give customers a bag even for the tiniest item. It was then on a trip to Coles Bay in Tasmania that she became really passionate about doing something about the problem.
"It was really cool what was happening there because it's such a tourist attraction and all of these thousands of tourists who came to see the national park were also witnessing a town without plastic bags and really seeing it work, she said by phone from her family home in Brisbane.
The village of Coles Bay, which attracts about 25,000 tourists a year, became the first community in Australia to ban the bags in 2003. The move was copied by dozens more communities in Australia and across the globe.
So Saxby brought the idea home. She took the idea to city council last year in Rossland.
"I said Rossland, let's do this and the whole town got excited," she said. "There was an overwhelming fervour."
The town vied to be the first town in North America to go bag free, but that honour landed in the lap of the small community of Leaf Rapids, Man., on April 2, 2007. With just over 500 residents, city officials handed out more than 5,000 free cloth bags. Leaf Rapids is about 980 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.
San Francisco became the first U.S. city to adopt a ban in March after efforts to impose a tax failed, while New Jersey is seeking to be the first state to phase out bags after government implemented a bill in November.
Large global cities are also jumping on board. London's 33 municipal authorities are pushing for an outright ban on plastic bags, and city council in New York trying to pass laws to bar the so-called white pollution.
"It's happening everywhere now," says Saxby, "Vancouver, Toronto, Whistler - all these places are looking at options and are committed to reducing or eliminating them. Reusable bags are everywhere."
The idea is gaining worldwide momentum. There are now restrictions or bans in Ireland, Taiwan, Kenya, Uganda, Zanzibar and South Africa, among others.
The chief administrator in Leaf Rapids, Martin Van Osch, says the whole community is willing to use the cloth bags to do their shopping. Local businesses could be fined $1,000 for ignoring the ban, but no fines have been levied.
"It's a good thing because people are learning that plastic bags are not free. There's a price," says Saxby.
It's estimated that plastic bags take about 1,000 years to break-down in the environment.
The tricky part of the equation for many Canadians is the perennial question: plastic or paper? But environmentalists say using paper isn't the answer either. Opponents say they use too many trees, create more greenhouse gas emissions in manufacturing and take up more space in landfills.
Environmentalists argue that consumers must look at other options.
"We wouldn't oppose a ban, but we currently propose a tax," said the leader of Canada's national Green Party Elizabeth May, noting a federal ban is highly unlikely in Canada.
"We need to convince consumers that, on so many levels, these are not essential products," she says. "It's a created false need."
Saxby agrees. "It was only in the '70s that we even started to use these plastic bags."
Tips to reduce plastic bag use:
Buy cloth shopping bags available at most grocery stores.
If you are only buying a couple of items, consider carrying them.
Consolidate purchases into one bag.
Place fruit and veggies directly into your basket.
Purchase lightweight mesh or cotton fruit and veggie bags to use for little things like peas or beans.
Avoid double bagging.
If an item already has a handle don't put it in another bag.
Ask the store for produce boxes that you can re-use and then recycle.
On a bike? Take a back-pack with you.
What can I use as a garbage bag?
Compost organic material. Recycle as much as possible. Rinse your bin and reuse.
Re-use newspaper to line your garbage bin: Save a few sheets of newspaper each week to wrap your rubbish or line your garbage bin. This helps minimize mess and is a good alternative to plastic garbage bin liners.
Purchase biodegradable bags. While biodegradable bags are not the solution (we need to reduce our waste first!) they are a compromise if you feel you do need to line your bin.
What can I use to pick up dog poop?
Re-use plastic bags that you get as packaging. For example, bread bags, or paper mushroom bags.
Buy a dog-composting unit that you can install in a corner of your yard.
Ask your local pet store to order a dog composting unit for you.
Guess I’ll have to burn my fall leaves./sar
When asked at checkout; “Paper or plastic?”, I always tell them “Plastic. I want to destroy the world!” All laugh. Maybe a third of them understand.
Now I have a new idea; “Plastic. Securely placed over a watermelon’s head.” Good immediate use. And the implications are endless.
You think Texas doesn’t have any trees? I can see you have never traveled in Texas, we have miles and miles and MILES of trees. We also have signs that read [DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS] which means don’t throw your trash out of your car window. But she/he didn’t say she had never seen a tree, she/he has never seen a plastic bag in a tree and I don’t seen very much of that myself.
Personally I would be glad to see paper bags come back, especially the heavy ones with handles. I hate those plastic bags.
For one thing, groceries are harder to pack in plastic bags and they don’t hold as much as paper bags. And I count how many times I’ve gotten home to find some of my groceries have rolled out because the bags don’t stand up and are slippery and tend to slide and roll around (in the back of my gas guzzling SUV of course – maybe this would happen if I drove a hybrid Prius ;), ).
I do save some plastic bags and use them for garbage and for packing my lunch but paper bags can serve the same purpose and they all get thrown away eventually. And since it takes more plastic bags to bag the same amount of groceries than can fit into paper bags, I end up throwing many of the plastic bags away.
My mother used paper grocery bags for a lot of things before recycling was cool (we weren’t green back then – we were just poor) – she made book covers for my school books, used them for gift wrapping paper and used them to drain and absorb fat off of fried foods and for cooling cookies on. My mother also recycled my father’s old undershirts as dust and cleaning rags.
And one time I unknowingly ran over a plastic grocery bag and it got stuck to my exhaust system. I pulled over because I suddenly smelled a burning plastic smell so bad, I thought my car was on fire. I went to my mechanic and he found the bag had melted to the manifold and tail pipe. He pulled off as much as he could but I was stuck with that nauseating smell for weeks.
I also hate some of the plastic packaging that requires you to have heavy duty industrial scissors or a utility knife just to open.
Then again I’m old enough to remember as a kid when milk was delivered to our doorstep in glass bottles and we went to the butcher shop to buy our meats who wrapped meat in “butcher’s paper” so maybe I’m just getting old and cranky.
No, I’ve only been to Dallas and Houston....so, you’re right, haven’t seen many trees.....and am jealous of your sunshine! Maybe you have neater folks than we do here, also....LOL.
I live in Houston and we have lots of trees, native and planted. Huge pine trees in the north part of Houston (Kingwood area all the way to Arkansas) should have made you feel at home. I have been to Washington and it is beautiful, the eastern part of your state was pretty barren as I recall.
I don’t know if we have neater folks maybe just better clean up crews. I know I saw a beer can on my front side walk that I haven’t picked up yet.
Very good point! The groceries that are put in them are not sterile. They have been handled by dirty hands that are checking lables and comparing prices. I can imagine someone walking into a supermarket with unwashed hands that just pumped out someones septic tank. All these groceries that go into these cloth bags leave a residue which will be picked up on you next batch of groceries. If these bags don't get washed, they can turn them into a petri dish of disease which will soon wind up in your cupboards.
Solution to it all — buy a truck and a shovel. Dump everything in the back of the truck, shovel it out when you get home and make the ma and the kids pick it up and put it where it belongs. If you ain’t got no kid, you’re in trouble — you and ma better get busy.
~~AGW ™ ping~~
And paper doesn’t keep the burgers hot like styrofoam!
My favorite McD’s burger, the “Hot and Tasty” or whatever it was called in the 80s, “kept the cool side cool and the hot side hot”—so crisp lettuce and cool tomatoes on the hot burger; but when styrofoam had to go the burger had to go too.
They get to eliminate plastic bags as a cost-saving measure (make no mistake about it -- this is the REAL motivation behind this whole trend, especially in light of the fact that rising oil prices have enormous implications for the price of plastic materials), and then claim that it's all part of a "go green" movement.
Ah, yes---those wonderful days of yore, when condensation from frozen products weakened the paper, and the bottom dropped out as you were trying to get from car to house. Or, when the extremely weak paper bag "just tore" and accomplished the same spillage of groceries.
No thinks, I prefer plastic. And if you actually look into the statistics, plastic bags are "less bad" for the environment because they take less energy to make, and take up less space in the landfill.
This is just one more attempt to introduce "Euro-think" into the US.
See post 74.
Watch for Walmart within two years to adopt this policy as well. Of course they will have a cloth bag {where their logo in huge letters} to sell you at a price. Their CEO won’t be able to help himself like he wasn’t on the lightbulbs either.
carry a plastic sandwich bag. fold the bag back over your hand so the bag is inside out. after you pick up pups poop,
just pull the edge down from your wrist so the bag is right side out. you never have to touch the poop. zip lock bags work well, also.
My favorite ‘plastic or paper’ story is what occured to me and my kids some 18yrs ago on a quick run in the store for a gallon of milk, a bunch of bananas and a package of (horrors!) disposible diapers. At the checkout, the dingy cashier put the bananas in one of those hated/disgusting plastic bags and basically turned her back to us, sighing like her job was just so stressful she now needed a nap. I looked at the milk -with a handle, the diapers -with a handle, the bag of bananas -with a flimsy handle, and my less than a year old son -no handle. The well behaved daughter of about 6 could be trusted to hold onto the shouldered purse strap and stick with me. Yes, I could have grabbed a cart put everything in it (I had used one of their little hand held baskets that she then confiscated from me) and wheeled it out to the car, then wheeled the cart back to the store (no cart returns then and I always brought my cart back) then carried my not quite toddler back to the car as my daughter trudged carefully along with me(I never put my kids in until I was ready to get in and drive off), but I just saw red. I knew it could be done if the silly girl had a brain in her head. I tried not to snap her head off and REQUESTED one of those horrid paper bags. She gives me this ‘who do you think you are’ look, but coughs one up. I put the milk in the bottom, stood the diaper pack on it’s end and slid it in, then dropped the bananas (after taking it out of that silly plastic bag- leaving it laying for her to deal with)on top of the milk. I grabed the STURDY bag in the crook of my free arm, told Steph to grab onto my purse, looked (I’m sure with some disgust) at the girl and told her, “I have two kids and two arms, not five.” She just looked confused. I knew then that she’d never get it...
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C S Lewis
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.