The answer is — bring your own.
I know, sometimes I forget too. You know what I do then? I carry the things I bought to my car without a bag. Sometimes I wheel them out to my car in a cart, load them in my car, sometimes into the bags that I left in the car, sometimes just into my car, take the stuff home and then carry it into my home without a bag.
I’ve even gotten creative and zipped stuff up my jacket (both on and off my body) and used it as a bag. We use a million plastic bags every minute of every day and every night, and I do not want to be a part of it anymore! So I refuse to take new plastic bags.
Manufacturing virgin plastic bags requires drilling for oil and then making that oil into plastic. Thank you for trying to recycle them by dropping them off in the plastic bag recycling bins at the grocery store or Target, but the sad reality is that only 1% of those plastic bags are getting recycled! Many of our plastics are proprietary blends that make recycling very difficult.
The cost of virgin plastic is actually cheaper than recycling. And there is not enough of a market for plastic-bag manufacturers to use post-consumer waste plastic to manufacture recycled plastic items.
So, what about paper bags? They’re ok — but think about what it takes to manufacture a paper bag. First, you must cut down fast-growing, planned paper trees (this is much more sustainable than old growth forests). Then you must add water and a number of chemicals to break down the wood fiber to a pulp. Then form the paper, cut it, fold it, glue it (glue is also made of chemicals) and then use it for the 15 minutes it takes to carry your groceries to your car and then to your home.
You can use that bag to put your recyclables in the bin (I used a big gift bag someone gave me years ago that I filled up and emptied over and over again). You can even use your paper bag to wrap gifts. But to what end?
Why not instead use something that you already have? We all already have many reusable fabric bags — they may be PET, cotton or denim, some are insulated. They all are reusable, washable, mendable and fixable. We may get them at work, school, a baseball game or as a marketing gift at the hair salon.
Please use these. Use them until you have to mend them and mend them again. Carry them with you.
So “paper and plastic?” might not be the question we should be asking ourselves. Maybe we should be asking ourselves how we can get into the habit of carrying bags with them. If we all carried them with us all the time, we’d always have one just in case we needed to pick something up and carry it home.
Maybe we could get someone famous to start this global trend. Get those stuffable bags and shove them in your back pocket every time you walk down the street.
We really are in this together– I’m open to your ideas!
Plastic reduction is great