Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags

By Roxanne Mirabal Beltran (“Going Green on Glenwild”)

I don’t blink; neither does he. He hasn’t let go and so I continue to stare and then, in a friendly but firm voice, restate my request. He stares back and asks, “Are you sure?” Of course I am! And so goes the exchange at our local Safeway at least the first couple of times I showed up with my own bags. Now when I go to the check out, neither one of us blinks an eye and I leave satisfied that, at least on that particular day, I didn’t bring home an unneeded plastic bag.

For the past couple of years, our family’s answer to the “paper or plastic” dilemma has been “neither.” Keeping them in the trunk of my car, I have used my own canvas bags virtually everywhere — from Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Giant, and Safeway to Target, Value Village, and our local library.

There are some perks. Most stores give you a bag credit when you bring your own bags. It isn’t much. At Whole Foods you receive a 5¢ refund on each bag you bring in. At Giant it’s 3¢ per bag, but our local Safeway doesn’t offer a discount (maybe something to write to the branch about?). Trader Joe’s doesn’t offer a discount either, but they do offer you a chance to sign up for their raffle every time you use your own bags (the prize is a free bag of groceries!).

But it isn’t about the money. It is about the fact that the 14,000,000,000 plastic shopping bags that are used each year in the U.S. alone “ don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade — breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits... [and] in a landfill, plastic bags take up to 1,000 years to degrade!” The ones that don’t make it to a properly contained landfill could end up killing one of the 100,000 marine animals that are killed each year due to plastic bags. I’m not just quoting exaggerated statistics. Just check out the BBC news website (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/ 2205419.stm) and you will find that others in the world think it’s a problem too. Ireland levies a 15¢ plastic shopping bag tax, Bangladesh bans polythene bags altogether, and retailers in South Africa face fines or even jail time if they hand out a “national flower” (so called because of the number of bags littering their streets).

I know they may be convenient, but once you find your reusable bag, you might never want to use a plastic one. I think one of the best bags are the Whole Foods bags. You can purchase these snazzy collectible bags at the check out for $1 and they have a long handle that allows you to slip the bag over your shoulder, a very nice feature. They are also very strong (I use one for all of our library books) and sturdy enough to stand on their own and allow easy loading. Giant also sells two different bags. There is a large green mesh one that costs $3.49 with all proceeds going to the Blind Industries and Services of Maryland and there is another smaller blue canvas bag with longer handles from Earthwise that costs 99¢. Trader Joe’s also cost 99¢, with short handles, and a fun red and white print. But these are just those that you find in your local supermarkets; any reusable bag that is strong enough for groceries will work great!

What truly amazes me is that I still sometimes get funny stares when I use my own bags. You know, the ones that say: oh, great, an environmentalist. But the thing is I don’t consider myself one; I don’t do enough to deserve the title! I’m just your average shopper that doesn’t want to add more trash to our overloaded landfills! And I think it is really convenient. I don’t need to double or triple bag my groceries, because my bags are sturdy enough not to break. I don’t need to figure out where to store those pesky plastic or paper bags, because I keep my reusable ones in the trunk of my car. I don’t struggle to figure out how to carry all of those random bags, because I just swing my Whole Foods bags over my shoulder which leaves my hands free to hold my car keys and my Starbucks coffee.

Oh, yeah. That’s another one. I love taking my own “commuter mug” to Starbucks. I don’t “waste” a cup and they actually give you a whole 10¢ off your coffee (plus double the whip if you get a tall)! “In 2003, [Starbucks] customers used their own mugs 13.5 million times, which prevented more than 586,000 pounds of paper waste from reaching landfills!” [Source: www.starbucks.com.) I mean, if I must fulfill my coffee addiction, at least I can lessen it’s environmental impact! But regardless of which bag or mug you end up using, the true point is that our family is always trying to find ways of practicing the other two R’s we usually forget — reduce and reuse! We don’t get tops or straws for our drinks anymore; we try to use tupperware versus ziplock bags; we are weaning ourselves of our paper towel use; these among the many other things we learn about along the way. They are just small little things that aren’t really inconvenient, just a matter of consciousness. Care to share your ideas? ■