Now is the time for BYOB
It is time for BYOB! Yes, bring your own shopping bag! As we continue our journey through a busy 2010, it’s crazy to think about how much shopping we historically do here in America and world-wide. Whether it be frequent trips to the grocery store as we keep our kitchen’s stocked for wonderful meals and tasty treats or those sometimes dreaded (yet skillful) “6 bags on each arm” walks through the local mall, it all adds up to so much unnecessary waste. One of the most blatant examples of this waste is disposable shopping bags.
An estimated 100 billion plastic shopping bags are consumed each year in the USA, according to the Wall-Street Journal. Most plastic bags end up in landfills and the rest often end up in rivers, ponds, lakes, streams or in the sea, where animals can ingest or become entangled in them. Considering how many shopping bags are consumed and wasted each year, the time is now to spread the word about the positive benefits of eco-friendly reusable shopping bags. After all, most of us want to give back to our families, friends and communities as often as possible.
Adopting a BYOB strategy in our individual shopping habits is a simple way to do just that. If we can raise awareness at this time, the positive impact for the environment is incalculable for 2010 and well into the future. Several cities have already made gradual but significant progress in promoting the use of eco friendly reusable bags in recent years. Motivating consumers with plastic and paper bag bans, discounts at the register for reusable bag usage and tax motivations are a few to speak of.
Right here in America, the San Jose City Council recently passed one of the nation’s strictest bans on plastic and paper shopping bags. This is a big victory for the Bay Area, which has 1 million plastic bags per year accumulating in and along the San Francisco Bay. San Jose becomes the latest bay area city to enact some type of ban on disposable shopping bags; others include San Francisco and Palo Alto. Tracy Seipel of the San Jose Mercury News reported that it was actually ONE man who really jump-started the ban, another great example of the power of one person. Here’s a an excerpt:
“While visiting his sister-in-law in Taipei, (Kansen) Chu (elected to San Jose city council in 2007) went grocery shopping and was surprised to get charged for plastic grocery bags. The next day, he brought his own cloth bags back to the store. “I guess the question,” said Chu, “was, ‘Why not San Jose?’ ” He began a conversation with the city’s environmental services staff, which later moved to council committee discussions.
Save the Bay’s 4th annual report on the most garbage-strewn sites in the region further demonstrates the need for BYOB. The 50-year-old environmental advocacy group focused on 10 specific bay-area sites where almost 15,000 plastic bags were retrieved in one day last year in their report. Here’s an excerpt of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kelly Zito.
According to (Save the Bay’s) research, Californians use about 19 billion plastic bags each year, 3.8 million in the Bay Area. The average use time for the bags – made using about 12 million barrels of oil each year in the United States – is about 12 minutes. In addition to the hundreds of years it can take for a plastic bag to decompose in a landfill, the bags also force downtime when fed into traditional recycling equipment. Typically, the bags get wound into conveyor belts or gears and must be cut out by hand.
Ten US cities have banned plastic bags so far, five within the past year. Even Mexico City enacted a ban on plastic shopping bags, which went into effect in August. The city of 20 million now faces the realities of effective enforcement, which is not easy when the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce estimates there are 35,000 vendors in Mexico City’s downtown area alone.
Bans on plastic bags aren’t the only effective way to reduce harmful waste caused by disposable bags. PlasTaxes, which tax consumers at the register for using plastic bags when shopping, were first introduced by the Irish. John Roach of National Geographic reported in 2008 on the worldwide momentum that’s been building since Ireland instituted a PlasTax in 2003. The Irish showed they could reduce plastic bag consumption by 90% or more. Momentum is growing across the world, particularly in America. From Washington, DC to Edmonds, WA to North Pole, AK, communities and governments are spurring an international trend to reduce the harmful environmental effects of disposable shopping bags. In the great state of Hawaii, the legislature is currently considering a bill to ban single-use plastic bags (SUP), or to establish a small fee to use SUP bags.
Even major retail stores like Target and CVS Pharmacy are taking action by enacting discounts at the register for customers who choose to BYOB or just carry-out their items without a bag. For the naysayers, it’s convenient to ignore recent momentum in reducing disposable bag waste. But to some, the wide-spread adoption of eco-friendly reusable bags is inevitable. Look at the way smoking is becoming taboo in America. Indoor smoking bans have caught on like wild-fire. In the same way, who is to say the use of disposable bags won’t become taboo at some point in the (hopefully near) future? The use of eco-friendly reusable grocery bags is definitely gaining steam. Our individual choices to bring our reusable bags can go a lot farther than we think. That’s what BYOB is all about.
Of course, plastic and paper bags should be recycled and it’s important to remember most large retailers including Albertsons and Wal-Mart will recycle plastic bags for you (just need to bring them your accumulated stash). That being said, a BYOB shopping strategy can make your life so much easier because there is no longer a need to accumulate that cupboard full of plastic bags or figure out what and when to do something about it. Keeping a few non woven bags in your car or backpack is a good way to ensure you have them when needed. So give back this holiday season by remembering to BYOB! Whether it be at a convenience store, the mall, or while grocery shopping, we can make a difference for the environment and help raise awareness one transaction at a time. In the fight to eliminate disposable shopping bag waste, 2010 is our moment. Have a great rest of the year!
Images of landscapes littered with plastic bags are part of every stored image of my travels in Central America and Southeast Asia, one time in particular. During Holy Week in 2004, a Nicaraguan family invited me to a wildlife preserve for a picnic. The spot we found had plastic bags and trash all over.
I thought I would “do my part” to pick up a few fistfuls of garbage within a 20 foot radius. I put them in plastic bags that I found stuck in some bushes. When we hiked out I noticed that a few of my friends had picked up the trash, contained within a few bags and for the moment I considered it a capacity-building job well-done on my part: “Maybe I inspired them” I thought.
After we had hiked out of the valley, my friends asked me what I wanted to do with the trash. “Well, I thought we could dispose of it in the trash can.” They reminded me that they didn’t have a trash service, and that the best way to dispose of trash was to throw it down the hillside, which is what they proceeded to do. I was taken back at first. “What do you mean you don’t have a trash service. Don’t they care about the environment?” I snubbed.
I later realized my naivete, and how my North Americanized ideals of environmentalism wouldn’t do for the complex problems of trash disposal in a poor country. It turned out they literally didn’t have a trash service! They couldn’t afford it. If a family lived on top of a hill, their backyard became their landfill. This was commonplace as I met more families. Many families didn’t had enough money to adequately feed and educate their children, let alone pay for trash service. When the trash pile grew too high, they would burn it. These dominate my memories of Nicaragua: The sight of plastic bags and smell of burning trash.
In one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, I saw how the lack of environmental policies stemmed from poverty and corruption in Nicaragua, not because the people didn’t care about the environment. For many poor farmers I worked with, recycling for them was using the plastic trash as firestarter to fuel their stoves. This cut down on the amount of trash they had to pay to be serviced. For us, we abhor this image and lament the pollution that burning plastic causes. But their system worked for them. It was a system fueled by their poverty: the lack of education and the dearth of money to have a good trash and recycling program.
We take things for granted in the US, where we have so many opportunities to reduce, recycle and reuse. Al’s blog points out the incredible amount of waste we generate in the US that only increases during these months. We have to start with ourselves. So BYOB works for me. Taking responsibility for my own baggage is something I can do. And with every bag that I remember to take with me to the grocery store, I recall one house I visited at the edge of the Managuan dump, which people called “La Chureca”. The family made their living washing plastic bags that they scavenged from the dump. They hung them out in the sun on the clotheslines to dry, and sold them in the market. This was their livelihood. Through their hard work, the family takes trash, cleans it, and recycles it by reinvesting it into the local economy. A great photography slide show about La Chureca can be viewed at http://www.lachurecaexhibit.com/ — a powerful vignette of people who work every day in the dump, Nicaragua’s recyclers.
Ryan, Thanks for the great comment and for helping spread the word about BYOB this holiday season. Reading about your experience in Nicaragua is incredibly educational, and that La Chureca slide show is powerful. For anyone who missed it, it’s worth checking out: http://www.lachurecaexhibit.com/
Thanks again, your insight has helped me to better see this issue from a Central American and even global perspective, and that is invaluable.