Bring Your Own Bag

By Lauren Stuart

Let me start this article out by being perfectly honest – I used to think those people who brought their own reusable cloth bags to the grocery store were raging hippies just looking for another way to express their hippie-ness. I used to scoff at the “did you remember to bring your reusable bag?” signs outside of well-known grocery stores. I thought I was being environmentally aware when I would combine my milk and bread into the same plastic bag. I mean, what’s the big deal? It’s just a few plastic bags. It’s not like I’m doing any imminent harm to the environment, right? Wrong.

When the average person thinks about a plastic bag, the words indestructible, harmful and potentially fatal typically don’t come to mind, although they should. A plastic bag, like the one you get from a grocery store or drug store, is made from polyethylene, a substance that comes from the nonrenewable resource, petroleum. A single plastic bag can take up to 1,000 years to break down in the environment. Even when it eventually does “break down,” it still isn’t completely gone. A plastic bag breaks down into even smaller plastic bits. These plastic bits are then in the air, in the oceans, and consequently in our food chain.

 Both marine animals and birds often mistake these plastic bags floating around in the ocean for food and consume them. These plastic pieces stay in the digestive tracts of the animals, making it difficult for them to get the right nutrients, causing starvation and often times causing death (1). If the fish or animal doesn’t die from eating that plastic bag and somehow makes it on to your dinner plate, chemicals in the environment that attach themselves to the plastic can potentially stay with that animal and consequently affect you after you eat it. It is a nasty, unhealthy and dangerous cycle, all starting with a single plastic bag.

Because of the negative consequences that have come about from frequent and unnecessary usage of plastic bags, many different countries have begun to implement programs focused on reducing the use of plastic bags.

Some countries, like Eritrea, Rwanda and Somalia, have placed a ban on plastic bags all together, while some countries, like South Africa and Taiwan, have banned only the thin, light-weight plastic bags. Other countries, like Germany, Belgium, Holland and Ireland, have taxed or charged for plastic bags. Switzerland also requires supermarkets to charge shoppers for plastic bags (2).

One of the more notable plastic bag bans has come from China, a country where residents formerly used up to 3 billion plastic bags per day, which translated into 37 billion barrels of crude oil being used each year to create these plastic bags (3). As of 2008, China banned the production of thin plastic bags as well as prohibited supermarkets from distributing them freely. As Alex Pasternack from Treehugger.com reports, “China’s ban on thin plastic bags cut the use of 40 billion bags, reduced plastic bag usage by 66 percent and saved China 1.6 million tons of petroleum.”

As of 2007, San Francisco became the first city in the United States to place a ban on plastic bags. Currently, a bill that proposes to ban single-use plastic bags throughout the state of California is in the works. As of now, only individual cities and counties can ban grocery stores or drug stores from distributing free plastic bags.

I had been hearing buzz about the negative consequences of plastic consumption for some time, but I let it go in one ear and right out the other. It wasn’t until a friend sent me a link to a picture that I truly began to understand how a single person’s plastic consumption can wreak havoc on the environment and marine life. The picture was of an adorable, innocent little turtle chewing on a piece of plastic from a thin blue plastic bag.  That’s when I started thinking. What if that turtle was chewing on a piece of plastic that came from a plastic grocery bag that I had used? If that little piece of plastic could find its way to that cute little turtle’s mouth, what are the millions and billions of other pieces of plastic pollution doing to our world?

 After that moment, my life slowly started to change. I ditched plastic water bottles in favor of a (much cuter) stainless steel refillable water bottle. I stopped wrapping things in cellophane and made a conscious effort to stop buying things that come in plastic bottles or packaging. I have even become one of those people who bring reusable cloth bags to the grocery store. I wasn’t comfortable with knowing that a piece of plastic that I used could result in the harm of an animal, the environment, or even another human being.

There are many people who support the notion of a plastic bag ban, and there are many who oppose it. No matter what side of the debate you stand on, the facts and figures about plastic pollution are staggering. Plastic bags are littering our oceans, killing our animals, and infiltrating our food chain. So the next time you go to the grocery store, the drug store, or the liquor store (hey, we’re not judging), please remember to B.Y.O.B.

Photo by Chris Jordan. 2007 Plastic Bags: Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every 5 seconds.

1. www.greenplate.org

2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7268960.stm

3. http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/15042)