Fort Worth Star Telegram ( Texas) June 23, 2004
Plastic-bag PLANET
Billions and billions of the crinkly carryalls populate our universe. As they pile up in drawers and trash bins we wonder, what do we do with them all?
LIZ STEVENS; Star-Telegram Staff Writer
What if there were no plastic bags?
It's a scary thought for many of us.
Where would we put wet bathing suits? How would we transport dog
poop? What would we use to line the bathroom trash bins?
The world would be a strikingly different place.
It already is in Ireland, where the government began taxing the
much-littered, slow-to-decompose plastic grocery and shopping bags
in 2002. Their use has dropped by 95 percent. The same thing is
happening in Australia and South Africa, where plastic bags are
sarcastically referred to as "the national flower." Taiwan has
banned them outright.
At home, California and New York City have recently tossed
around the idea of a tax. And in Chicago, entrepreneur Vincent Cobb
is betting that his 10-month-old Web site, Reusablebags.com, will
be at the forefront of the coming "bring-your-own-bag" revolution.
"The goal isn't to eliminate [plastic bags] 100 percent, because
there are times you're going to need them," says Cobb, whose
company sells hemp, nylon and cotton canvas bags. But, he adds, "I
think everybody senses that there's something out of whack here."
That might be overestimating Americans' collective concern.
After all, in the United States alone, consumers use 100 billion
plastic shopping bags every year, according to the Wall Street
Journal.
A lot of those end up waving from tree limbs, clinging to fences
or trotting down empty streets like stray animals. A tiny fraction
of them end up reincarnated as plastic "lumber" for decks and
chairs, as flowerpots or as new plastic bags.
But what do we do with most of them?
"Throw it away," says 25-year-old Roy Williams, referring to the
Footaction bag he was carrying through a local mall recently.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 99
percent of plastic bags end up in the trash.
Cobb argues that all that plastic is a waste of resources and an
unnecessary burden on landfills. His Web site doubles as an
activist hub, including a photo gallery of bag litter and soon to
include a petition supporting a U.S. PlasTax, like Ireland's. In
that country, consumers are charged the equivalent of 15 cents for
every shopping bag they take.
But just try to pry the American Eagle bag out of 15-year-old
Jordyn Walters' hand as she strolls the mall. Walters reports
having about 50 plastic bags stuffed in her bedroom closet.
"She's a good shopper," notes friend Britt, who carries a little
AE paper sack and says she is too embarrassed to give her last
name.
Walters uses the bags to carry her things when she sleeps over
at friends' houses. She's blunt about Cobb's "bring-your-own-bag"
concept:
"That's a stupid idea."
"That's what the store's job is," Britt adds.
Americans love plastic bags. We hate them, too. We love them for
their convenience -- their handles, their light weight, their water
resistance, their uncanny ability to keep dirty underthings in a
suitcase separate from clean ones.
We hate them, some of us, because we have so dang many. We stuff
them into pantries and drawers and empty tissue boxes trying to
contain their unwieldy, crinkly masses.
"I just end up with so many plastic bags. There's only so much
you can do with them," laments Donna Lemons, who was toting a
plastic Foley's bag in Fort Worth the other day. But she finds ways
to use them: for the cat litter, for trash, for stray toys. "I have
eight grandkids and they're always leaving things at my house,"
says Lemons, 59.
And they're a heck of an improvement over those antiquated paper
bags, which "weren't good for much," says 83-year-old Bob McNeely.
"I can live without them," McNeely says of plastic bags, like the
one he's holding. "But I'd rather not."
Advocates for a cleaner environment will tell you that the old
question, "Paper or plastic?" has proved moot. Both kinds of bags
require non-renewable resources, like oil, natural gas and virgin
forests. "Really, the right answer is a reusable bag," says Betsy
Taylor, president of the Center for a New American Dream, a
Maryland-based nonprofit organization that advocates responsible
consumption.
But the plastics industry says there are significant
differences. "Production of plastic grocery sacks uses 20 percent
to 40 percent less total energy than paper sacks and results in 80
percent less waste," according to the Society of the Plastics
Industry Web site. One 40-foot truck can deliver about a million
plastic bags, notes Rob Krebs, director of communications for the
American Plastics Council. A million paper sacks would require six
or seven trucks, he adds.
"You've already done a service to the environment by choosing a
plastic bag over a paper bag," Krebs says.
Plastic bags are a relatively recent phenomenon. Department
stores, such as Sears, switched to plastic in the mid-'70s. Grocery
stores began using them in 1977.
But it wasn't until 1982 that two of the country's largest
supermarket chains, Kroger and Safeway, started "to replace
traditional craft sacks with polyethylene 'T-shirt' bags," notes
the Film and Bag Federation's "Great Moments in Plastic Bag
History" timeline.
For retailers, plastic bags, costing as little as a penny
apiece, are hard to resist. Paper bags cost 5 or 6 cents apiece,
says Krebs.
Maybe that's why grocery store baggers are so generous with
plastic, postulates 60-year-old Jerry Wheat.
"The problem is, they put two or three items in one bag" instead
of five or six, says Wheat of Arlington, who had just loaded his
entire trunk and back seat with dozens of Wal-Mart bags. "There
probably only should be half that" number of bags.
Krebs notes that the plastics industry strongly encourages
recycling. And like most grocers, Wal-Mart has a bin where shoppers
can drop off their used plastic bags. Albertsons offers a 5-cent
rebate per bag to shoppers who bring their own, and the stores take
dry-cleaning bags and newspaper sleeves for recycling, too. Tom
Thumb and Central Market, among others, sell canvas bags.
A few people even remember to bring them -- sometimes.
"I have to admit . . . I don't always remember to do it," says
Taylor, of the Center for a New American Dream. "Even me. But it's
really not a hardship to take a canvas bag."
Taylor oftentimes declines to take a bag if she only has a
couple items. "I'll often try to talk to people about it," she
says, "and it's like I'm speaking to people from another planet."
Making people pay for their plastic bags, she and Cobb believe,
is the only way to change consumer behavior. That, and giving them
a trendy alternative, says Cobb.
"Our goal is to move the use of reusable shopping bags to the
mainstream," he says, "so the people who are pulling these things
out in stores are not [seen as] tree-huggers and eco-geeks, but as
cool and progressive."
Wanna get rid of some bags?
Only a few local supermarket chains actively recycle grocery
bags. After calling several in Tarrant County, here's what we
found:
* Albertsons -- Offers a 5-cent rebate for every bag customers
bring and use to carry out their products. There is no rebate for
recycling bags. The stores' recycle bins accept grocery, dry
cleaning and newspaper bags. Last year, the company recycled 13.9
million pounds of plastic. Every store features a plastic-lumber
bench, made from those bags.
* Tom Thumb -- Does not offer a rebate but has a bag-recycling
program and recycled 200,000 pounds of plastic last year, according
to parent company Safeway.
* Whole Foods -- Like Albertsons, offers a 5-cent rebate per
bag, has a recycling bin for bags and sells canvas shopping bags
for $6.99.
* Central Market -- Does not offer a rebate, but does recycle
bags. Sells canvas shopping bags for $1.99.
* Kroger -- Used to have a 10-cent-per-bag rebate program, but
it was dropped, according to one store employee.
* Wal-Mart -- Recycles plastic grocery bags.
Read the fine print when you recycle. Most bags need to be empty
and turned inside out. And before you put a plastic bag in your
recycling bin, check with your municipality. Most recycling
companies, like the one serving Fort Worth and Arlington, do not
accept plastic bags, which can damage their equipment.