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I've never really developed an effective at-home workflow
for my plastic grocery bags. It seems that no matter how many times I try to
reinforce the idea of bringing reusable grocery bags to the store, they pile up
anyway. They're often repurposed as an impromptu lunch bag or dog waste
collector, but the intake always seems to supersede the reuse.
Many believe that we have a global problem with plastic bags.
They're everywhere. In the past week alone I've seen six or seven HDPE tumbleweeds
coursing along a sidewalk or thwacking into my windshield on the highway.
Plastic bags are produced and used in staggering amounts, kill livestock and
marine life, have an incredibly short average use span, and take hundreds of
years to break down but never fully biodegrade. So why are we still using them?
The plastic bag as we know it was developed in Sweden in the
mid-1960s. Engineers at Celloplast were the first to patent and manufacture the
bags, and the company operated as the near-sole producer worldwide until Mobil
overturned their US patent in 1977. Plastic bags were popularized in the US by
a few poly bag manufacturers, and plastic began to supersede paper in major
grocery stores in the early 1980s. (Interestingly,
there
was considerable consumer backlash despite businesses pushing plastic,
mostly because plastic bags with handles didn't come around until the 90s.)
The primary reason behind this popularity is fairly obvious:
tensile strength. A bag's polyethylene
variety--typically either high-density polyethylene (HDPE), low-density
polyethylene (LDPE), or linear LDPE (LLDPE)--determines its strength. Each of
these materials has a different degree of polymer chain branching, so that LDPE
dry cleaning bags tear so much more easily than those glossy, LLDPE "mall
store" bags. Compared to paper, plastic bags seem like the bee's knees: they've
got handles and rarely tear through the bottom; you don't need double-bagging
unless you're carrying something like two gallons of milk in the same bag.
Environmentalists soon began realizing that plastic bags
don't really go anywhere after they're used or reused. The late-1990s
revelation of the Great Pacific
garbage patch, a huge mass of rotating plastic waste caught in a gyre,
ignited public acknowledgment of the plastic bag issue. After this point the plastic
bag gradually attained its reputation as a drain-clogger, whale-choker,
baby-suffocator, etc.
Jurisdictions in most areas of the world have placed
restrictions on plastic bag use to counteract their negative effects. In 2008
China implemented a full ban on ultra-thin bags and a tax on plastic bags in
general and has reduced usage by 50%. Many European countries tax single-use
bags or push reusable bags. Some areas of the US have implemented localized
bans, taxes, or both at the city or town level. Some countries such as Italy
have only banned non-biodegradable bags.
Paper bags--the primary single-use alternative--are sourced from trees, so
environmentally conscious consumers are put in a kind of ethical bind when
visiting their grocery stores. What's more, a
not-very-publicized UK study found that the average cotton reusable
shopping bag is used about 50 times before it's discarded, but in most cases
they must be used well over 100 times to be considered "better for the
environment" than plastic bags.
In a world of paper vs. plastic vs. cotton, what's a consumer
to do?
Image credits: zeevveez (CC BY 2.0) / Wikimedia
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Re: Getting Help For The World's Plastic Bag Addiction
