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# Wednesday, April 04, 2007

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Plastic Bags

I grew up in New York City. You don't really become an environmentalist living there. There isn't much natural beauty, if anything, NYC represents the far end of the achievements man has made around urbanized living, economic power, social and cultural influence and concrete & glass.

Now that I live in California I can't help but love and appreciate nature. The California Coast is simply stunning and all the amazing natural resources out here on the west coast are easy to take for granted, but every time I pay my property and state income taxes I think... what a small price to pay for such an amazing place.

This brings me to my point. Now that I live in a house (first time in my life, I spent the rest in apartments) I can't help but see and feel the amazing amount of waste our society produces and we consume. The amount of trash and recycling that comes out of our house is shocking. When you live in an apartment this stuff just disappears down the trash shoot and you never see (only hear) the garbage trucks at 6am.

So, Lora and I do what we can to recycle. But that was just the beginning. I feel that I've turning into a Hippie :-). I remember the first time I went to Whole Fools and I was like, what is this place good for? They don't have good trash bags or Coke. And look at those weird bags people bring to the store for their groceries. Well now I'm one of those people.

I am HIGHLY IRRITATED when I go to Safeway and the bag people insist on placing one item in every bag. I come home and end up with like 20 crappy little plastic bags that you can't even recycle. These bags are made from oil and we consume an enormous amount of oil to make something that will sit in a land fill or end up somewhere on a freeway or beach cause it's cheap (about 1 cent a bag). However, San Francisco recently became the first city in the nation to BAN the use of plastic bags in Grocery Stores and Drug Stores.

Now, many can argue how bad this is and how it will drive up prices and blah blah blah. I say SHUT IT! Bio Plasic Bags (made from corn starch) cost a few cents more per bag. If this really bothers you buy a re-usable bag and keep it in your car. Whole Foods makes awesome reusable bags. They are large and have study handles and most all of your groceries will fit in 2-3 of them vs the 500 bags Safeway insists on giving you. In fact if you use such a bag at Whole Foods OR Safeway they will credit you a few cents per bag.

It's about time we start to pay for the very real cost of cleaning up the trash and mess and waste we spew into the world. Now that we have a child I'm even more sensitive about what we are not doing to ensure that she will enjoy this place as much as we do.

IMHO San Francisco is on a role. First they ban Baby products that contain harmful Bisphenol A (BPA) from things like baby bottles, and now plastic bags. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy that our irresponsible behavior to our natural resources and our over reliance on plastic and petroleum at the cost of our health and our planet is starting to trend back in the right direction.

I grew up as a cynic of recycling. Now I buy my tooth paste from Whole Foods and use my green bag. Go figure. I drove a Prius for the first time the other day, and while I still think it's ugly, I can't help but feel ashamed for driving a car that gets such terrible mileage.

Personal
Posted Thursday, April 05, 2007    Permalink    Comments [14]  View blog reactions

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Thursday, April 05, 2007 5:30:04 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I agree. I hate it when they put 1 item in a bag, insist on bagging the gallon milk containers. If you tell them to fill the bags, they do, but double bag them.

They do have recycling bins for those bags in the grocery stores down here (South Florida).

Fred
Fred Beiderbecke
Thursday, April 05, 2007 6:50:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
But I use the bags! Actually, IKEA really gets on my nerves now that they've decided to charge for each plastic bag. IKEA plastic bags were the most useful: they were huge, and made of strong plastic. I used to take an extra IKEA bag or two every time I shopped there--they were that nice.

But by all means Omar--assume that everyone else is as wasteful as you!
James
Thursday, April 05, 2007 7:50:51 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
James, the law does not ban Ikea bags. Also there is nothing wrong with Plastic Bags made from corn startch as they are bio-degradable. It seems like you have a problem with them charging for them. The bags aren't free for Ikea to make so what's wrong with them charging for something that costs them money to make?

BTW, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I'm wastefull. I currently recycle my safeway plastic bags by taking them back to safeway. However, only 1% of grocery plastic bags are recycled today. While you might not be wastefull, lots of people are.
Omar Shahine
Thursday, April 05, 2007 8:34:33 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I don't want to be a jerk about this, but I really thought this was all known ten-fifteen years ago. "Biodegradable" plastic bags are nice--provided you strew them across the countryside. Once you pack them in a dump, they don't disintegrate (and neither does paper, really). (I suppose this is obvious: if disintegrating garbage spreads pollutants, then your dump will be designed to keep garbage from disintegrating.)

I don't have any use for paper bags; every paper bag I receive is a waste. I do use plastic bags. Banning plastic bags is a way for certain people to feel better about themselves by making me more wasteful.

Concerning IKEA: I thought this was widely known, but although IKEA charges you for plastic bags, they don't keep that money--rather passing it along to some organization. I don't have a problem with IKEA recouping the cost of bags (or, as they do, the cost of credit card transactions); I do find their actual policy insulting. I realize that some people feel good about having to pay more to counteract others' supposed waste, but I guess I'm not one of them.

The basic structure of this anti-plastic-bag campaign shows up all over the place--for example, anti-cheap-beer campaigns near universities. I guess I would just point out, first, that the fact that you may waste plastic bags (or drink too much beer!) does not mean others do the same; and, second, the fact that you may not be aware of a use for plastic bags other than recycling (or a use for cheap beer other than drinking too much!) does not mean that no other use exists. After all, there are, I assume, some things beyond the understanding of the government of San Francisco.

Thank you for your time, and thanks, Omar, for your response and the space for this (overly wordy) reply.
James
Thursday, April 05, 2007 8:50:22 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
In a few countries they have taken the approach to charge people for plastic bags. The money goes to cleaning up the "countryside" etc. I believe they do this in Ireland.

I beleive that in calfifornia the legislature prevents any local government from forcing the grocers to do this, hence the bad. There is a good KQED podcast on this topic:

http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R704020900

I never said you needed to use paper bags. I don't use any paper or plastic bags, I bring my own sturdy bag when we go grocery shopping. It can hold more than any paper or plastic bag and it has nice handles for carrying.

Banning plastic bags is a way to prevent creating something that doesn't need to exist in the first place. There are plenty of good alternatives to using oil to make bags that do end up all over the place.

I don't have a problem with cheap beer by the way. I drank plenty of it in college, but today chose not to. I don't believe cheap beer harms the environment. But I could be wrong.

Omar Shahine
Thursday, April 05, 2007 1:34:37 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
QFC and Safeway do recycle plastic bags, so you can bring them back to them. What we've been doing is that we bought a few strong canvas bags from Whole Foods and no matter where we do our grocery shopping, we insist that they do not use their crappy little bags but pack in our bags instead, which we of course re-use. Problem solved.
Next problem: get rid of the incredible amount of unnecessary packaging around about anything. For example, do we need a plastic or paper sheet between each prosciutto slice?
Bertrand Le roy
Thursday, April 05, 2007 11:17:52 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
It's true that New York City has a reputation for being urban and "un-natural," like all stereotypes, it ignores the layered truth. New York City residents use walking and public transportation in their daily life that is a constant rebuke to the California stereotype of gas-guzzler. The Jamaica Bay Wildlife refuge is 90,000+ acres of quiet haven for birds, turtles and other wildlife inside the borders of NYC that is accessible via the Q51 bus. New Yorkers fish for both fresh water and oceanic species (there are over 300 different kinds in NYC). We are smack-dab in the middle of a major migratory flyway, and a host of other wildlife has adapted such that we have seals, turkeys, coyotes, deer, and beavers within the city limits, and our suburbs also have the ocasional bear and moose. New York City is home to a small subculture of surfers, a rather larger culture of hikers

NYC still has a tremendous problem with environmental degredation that causes us to have high rates of asthma and lead poisoning, particularly in lower-income areas. Green housing tactics are not yet in high use, but official agencies are beginning to incorporate them with an eye to trimming running costs.



Lisa Hernandez
Friday, April 06, 2007 6:01:19 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Glad to see someone else shares this irritation. While I find grocery stores pretty annoying, the worst are places like Borders or other such stores that assume that the purchase of a single small item, easily carried, demands a bag. I've even begun to get a bit short with folks who just wrap items in bags. The worst is when you request no bag and the person behind the counter looks at you like "are you crazy?"
Andy
Sunday, April 08, 2007 12:11:32 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

What does buying tooth paste from Whole Food exactly mean? I am missing something here. The tube isn't biodegradable, is it?

The tradition of using one's own bag has been in Europe for ages. When I was a kid, my German aunt would hand me a bag and send me to the grocery store. It's a shame only now the US is getting more responsible.
Abdu
Sunday, April 08, 2007 2:06:36 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Since we have moved to Ireland, I too have become used to taking my recycled-plastic or cloth/natural fiber bags with me everywhere, even to the "fancy" clothing shops (usually, when I don't want the bag so I can re-use it) as well as the grocery stores, DIY stores, drug stores, pretty much everywhere. The thing, however, which I have found counter-institutive here is the excessive product packaging.
The prime example is many of the organic and better quality fresh foods (within the grocery stores, not at the farmer's markets of course) are actually packaged in plastic to keep them nice or bundled them as a set to purchase in a plastic tray with plastic wrap on them! I really hate this and wish I knew the logic behind the purpose.
I too was a whole-foods convert in the states (I even still use my cloth bags from WH here in Ireland)and can't remember many times when I ended up with anything in a bag, much less 1/2-3/4 of my fruits and veg in some sort of package. Sigh....the store won't litter with shopping bags, but my trash seems to fill up quickly because they won't let you recycle this type of plastic at curb-side.

As another side-note - The EU is certainly not perfect in its recycle attempts and Ireland is still far behind what the recycling programs did in CA before we moved -the recycle bin in IE is only collected once a month from the curb (and you can't put any outside the bin) and they only take a very limited amount of product. We end up having a make a special half-day trip once a month to the only recycle center in our greater area that will take all the things we collect. I can't imagine the average person goes to this much effort and how much gets thrown away.
Paula
Monday, April 09, 2007 8:12:40 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
So...just cloth diapers for Sarah from now on? :)
Tim B
Monday, April 09, 2007 10:20:46 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Disposable Diapers are in fact a horrible waste of natural resources.

I did some research into Cloth Diapers before we had Sarah. There are two schools of thought. Once says that the disposable diapers (at least the ones offered by the companies with pick up and delivery) use a horrible amount of resources to clean them (chemicals and water).

So we were kind of on the fence. At least right now at her age. We are thinking of moving to those diapers (I forget the name of the company) that is kind of a hybrid between disposable and cloth. You basically dispose of the "stuff" in the toilet and flush it and the remainder of the waste is biodegradable.
Omar Shahine
Thursday, April 12, 2007 12:43:08 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Hahaha... i was about to comment on this until i noticed the Amazon ad below this comment box advertising "The Romance of Kenny G" for $14.99.

One interesting use that I've found for those pesky plastic bags. When Keira drops a dookie, we end up putting it in a plastic bag, tying it airtight, and then throwing it into our diaper champ. At least we're getting a second use out of the bag and the diaper champ alone isn't enough to keep the smell under control.

Also, check out my blog on the Inconvenient Truth. Lots of people are thinking green these days.
Richard Sim
Friday, April 27, 2007 10:26:45 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I love this new law in SF and I'm proud of our little city for blazing a new trail here. I've already been buying Bio-bags (bio-degradable bags) for composting our food scraps each week but whenever I go to a supermarket, I have to make sure I tell them early on that I want paper bags. Paper bags are handy (though also are wasteful that we waste trees creating them I guess), but at least they're biodegradable and more easily re-usable than the crappy plastic bags.

I also hate the little plastic bags that my newspaper comes wrapped in... those things are worthless too!
Heather Friedland
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