Bagman
At first glance, this week’s offering may appear to be rather nit-picky and perhaps could fall under the category of a pet peeve. Granted, writing about my grievances regarding the overuse of bags is a very personal issue. So I’m going to begin with a story, but please stay with this because I will make an important point.
On occasion I will go into a store to make a purchase, which in this case I’ll use Panera Bread Company as my retailer of choice. Usually I will ask for a loaf of Country Sourdough and even though my diabetic self knows better, a Pecan Braid as well. Invariably the person behind the counter reaches for a bag in which to place my Pecan Braid. “Please”, I say, “no bag. You can just hand it to me because I’m going to eat it.”
The person helping me almost always gets this confused look on their face because I’m asking for something completely out of the ordinary. Sometimes the person will even ask, “Are you sure you don’t want a bag?” At which point I explain that if they put it in a bag and hand it to me, I would remove the Pecan Braid from the bag and throw the bag into the garbage near the counter. And then I will nicely say, “So what’s the use of a bag?”
At that point I can usually see the light bulb go off as they realize the entire bag thing is indeed rather silly. But the issue has its roots in culture not reasoning. We live in a packaged society where there is a sense that everything must be placed into a bag prior to the customer receiving the goods, whatever those goods might be. The purchase can be a few screws at a hardware store, a tube of toothpaste at the drug store, or a Pecan Braid from Panera’s.
Certainly there are times when an actual bag is more than useful. It would be quite difficult to juggle 20 items purchased at the grocery store without one. But we also don’t need to answer the standard question: Paper or Plastic? Bringing our own reusable bag is one solution. They can be canvas, polyester, cotton, or hemp, for there are dozens of options. Several states including California have outlawed plastic bags and require customers to either bring their own bag or purchase a suitable reusable carrier at the store.
Ultimately, is asking for a pastry to be handed to me instead of being placed into a bag going to save the planet? “No”, would be the practical answer. But this issue represents something deeper and more nefarious. What seems to make sense is that we can incorporate mindfulness into the process of making the world a better place by placing an emphasis on reducing the unnecessary obliteration of our natural resources.
When people allow themselves to become oblivious to our environmental problems by accepting that bag and immediately dumping it into the nearest trash receptacle, humanity is making an unconscious statement that suggests a sense of Entitlement. Somehow people believe that the resources we waste are unlimited in scope and one little bag doesn’t really impact climate change.
An article in Stanford University Magazine, (produced for alumni), author Ethan Estess states that, “It takes around a gallon of water per bag to filter and clean the pulverized cellulose fibers of a felled tree to create flawless brown paper. Around 14 million trees a year are chopped down to make brown paper bags.” (see article)
The Wikipedia entry on Plastic Bags is even more discouraging:
“Plastic bags are mostly made out of petroleum products and natural gas. 8% of the world's petroleum resources are used for creating plastic bags at 12 million barrels of oil a day. Half of that is used as materials to make them, and the other half for energy to make them. At this rate, it will soon run out, impacting many things that depend on the resource. Not to mention all the air pollution it causes.
Non-compostable plastic bags can take up to 1000 years to decompose. Plastic bags are not capable of biodegradation but rather they photodegrade, a process by which the plastic bags are broken down into smaller toxic parts. In the 2000s, many stores and companies began to use different types of biodegradable bags to comply with perceived environmental benefits.”
For most of us, this is not a shock. We are aware of the impact of plastics and how they worm their way into everything from the air we breathe, to our clothing, to the food we eat. Unfortunately there are studies decrying the environmental impact of the manufacturing of the reuseable bags mentioned above, so there is no perfect solution. It is all a matter of degree. In our household we use canvas bags of which I keep a stash in my car for shopping at the grocery store. These are lesser of several evils, or at least that’s my justification.
The bottom line is that the best solution is just to use less. If we stop for a moment prior to accepting a bag and ask ourselves if that bag is really necessary, we can make that small but significant difference in our mindset and act as an example to others. It is a way to improve our world bit by bit. Something simple. Something good.
Here’s how I deal with bags:
I have one of those reusable wine bags, and I roll up 5 reusable grocery bags and put them in the slots of the wine bag, saving the last slot for my reusable produce bags (used for produce that doesn’t need a plastic bag in my fridge). I enjoy the comments from checkout staff about my Bag O Bags!
The produce bags that I do bring home get reused (unless said produce rots in them or tears them). I bring them to farmers market, use them for dredging stuff in flour, use them to cover dishes in the fridge, as emergency protective gloves, etc.
The paper grocery bags that I get when I forget my Bag O Bags line my kitchen recycle can and get reused until they fall apart. It’s a minor crisis if I run out, but I have a friend who has a huge pile of bags she can give me.
My current pet peeve is the small opaque plastic bags that grocery checkout folks sometimes slip over items they think are too messy to go directly into my bags. I am pleased that fresh meat, poultry and fish increasingly come wrapped in leak proof packaging (but cucumbers…really?). Checkout folks have not realized this makes extra bags unnecessary.
Anne – Thank you for your reply and sorry I didn’t respond sooner (crazy week). Somehow what you have told me about your own actions is not surprising. What I do know of you is that you are mindful (YAY!) and concerned for the planet and its inhabitants. Your actions with regard to even small things is something that I wish were more common. And as for people bagging at grocery stores, yes, sometimes it’s easier to let the person just add another superfluous bag rather than trying to stop them and explain. I would think that it would be apparent that we are attempting to reduce bag consumption when we bring our own, but that doesn’t seem to resonate. Oh well.
We are all bagmen here! A good vignette of our social situation.
In urban and suburban America we expect to bag everything, everywhere and every time that a purchase is made. That is our habit and we highly value routine do we not? Routine, settled expectations reduce the stress of improvisation, of having to think very much. I am certain that my way of life involves significantly less thinking than did that of my parents. And when you consider what life would have been like for great grandparents living before vaccines, before electricity?
Our society has “evolved” according to the needs of mass consumption, of exponential increase of production. That is with little to no thought, until very recently, about the demands of long term sustainability. Should the well being of nature including human well being collide with the demands of the maximum-profit machine, there is no debate about which of those is going to give way. Our landfills, the oceans are filled with cast off plastic. Microplastic contaminates our tissues.
Still it is possible I think to transform a culture, our way of doing things. A catastrophe big enough, terrible enough gets our attention. It would be preferable to be crippled as a nation and a society, than to commit slow-motion suicide on account of insisting upon what we prefer.
Jerry – Thank you again for your insights. For decades hundreds of articles and stories in every news outlet (except perhaps Fox) have been decrying the overabundance of plastic waste that is filling the oceans and permeating every nook and cranny of our planet. And yet we continue on as if this doesn’t really matter. Some do their best to mitigate their own personal consumption of both plastic and paper, but most of the time it feels like we’re attempting to clean up after a tidal wave with a toy bucket. The best we can do is to lead by example and hope that others will follow suit.
Bravo, Tobin! You’re a man after my own heart.
Brava, Anne! I love your Bag O Bags. What a great idea.
All those brown grocery bags with handles? We live in a senior community, where lunch and dinner are served, so our residents don’t do much grocery shopping. Yet, my husband collects 12 – 15 pristine grocery bags each of the 3 or more times a week he visits the trash rooms in our hallways. He takes the bags to the soup kitchen at our church, where they are used to provide carry-away meals for our homeless guests. They get used at least twice.
My cousins from the Seattle area visited a bit ago, and we shared childhood memories. One we all recalled was of freshly washed plastic bread bags hanging by clothespins on our clotheslines to dry. And we all still do a version of that!
Verna – Very encouraging words. During the Great Depression it seems that everything was reused for some purpose. Our predecessors saved wrapping paper and bits of string. WWII saw everyone gather scrap metal, newspapers, and any left over wire. How did our culture fall so far from that idea that everything can find a second life? As you and many others have found, it’s not that hard to put out a small amount of effort and repurpose or recycle. I feel old.