Reusable Shopping Bags... What's all the Buzz?
Excerpt from NotAWaste Article.

You may have noticed that beginning around April 2007 there was a wave of reusable shopping bag activity. Mostly this was directed towards encouraging people to start using reusable grocery bags That is where the average person consumes the most paper or plastic shopping bags. Why all of the sudden media buzz? Is it marketing hype, reactionary environmentalism or a meaningful campaign? And, assuming you find the premise for using them to be sound, we will provide a reusable bag buyer's guide to help you make a wise purchase.

Is It All Just Hype?

The statistics related to the consumption of plastic and paper shopping bags are nothing short of terribly alarming. Here are just a few:

• Americans consume 100 billion plastic shopping bags every year. Over 500 billion are consumed worldwide and about 4 billion become general litter.
• Plastic bags don't "biodegrade", they break down into tiny toxic bits which contaminate soil and water. They can take 1,000 years to break down.
• Fourteen million trees were cut in 1999 to produce the ten billion paper grocery bags used by Americans that year.
• Each ton of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatts of energy and 7,000 gallons of water.

Based upon our own calculations (all types of shopping without using reusable bags) it is likely that you use more than 2,000 paper and plastic shopping bags a year for each member of your family. Consider the volume of space that this might require if you had to put all of the disposable shopping bags you acquired into a closet. For a family of four, it wouldn't take long to need a bigger storage room. The fact is that none of this material is required to make life better or more enjoyable. Quite the opposite, it all goes to a recycling station or simply to a landfill where ultimately someone, our children or theirs at the latest, will find the consequences very disturbing.

It has become a common misconception that simply "recycling" our garbage is a sufficient response to the negative environmental impact we are having on our planet. It is much more important to eliminate things that we don't need first! Avoiding needless waste is far better than recycling though recycling is obviously much better than indiscriminate dumping. The buzz about reusable shopping bags is definitely a worthwhile campaign to reduce needless waste. It is a simple change of habit where everyone can have a meaningful impact ... one small needless shopping bag at a time.

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" has been a timely and well received reminder of the cornucopia of maladies we have levied upon our home planet. There have been others, perhaps beginning with Rachael Carson's "Silent Spring," and there will be many more until we find ways to significantly curb our desires for the needless, the wasteful and the toxic commodities now commonplace in the human culture. The reusable shopping bag buzz is definitely a significant and reasonable undertaking. The production and disposal of plastic and paper bags touches upon all facets of what we are doing wrong. The raw materials, be they pulpwood or petroleum, are better reserved for other uses. The production of disposable bags creates unnecessary pollution and wastes additional energy resources. And what we have at the end of these short life-cycle commodities is a great big pile of waste that needs to be dealt with.

Reusable shopping bags cannot eliminate all of the waste and energy consumption but they are vastly more efficient.

The sudden flurry of promotion for reusable bags is very simple. On one hand, there are realities being dealt with as land fills are simply filling up too fast. Many municipalities in the USA and abroad are grappling with possible legislation to ban plastic shopping bags. On the other hand, corporate public relations and marketing folks have obviously decided to get on the "right" side of this issue before being compelled or penalized.

Why All The Fuss Now?

NotAMall designed its' first reusable canvas shopping bag in late 2005 and sales were consistent until April (of 2007) when there was a sudden and dramatic spike in overall interest and sales. News articles suddenly appeared and well known celebrities such as Oprah aired a "green" show to launch the release of her own version of a reusable bag. Of course Oprah... ... is a unique phenomena and exerts a powerful influence on her fans. Many viewers ordered her “(O)” branded bags and will hopefully use them after the excitement of the media event wears off.

If habits can really be changed by all of the media hype and corporate posturing it will clearly do well and be good for the environment. In general, Europeans are ahead of us in this area and seem to accept the use of their own "containers" for shopping as a rational and sound practice without need of fanfare to get them motivated. It has been common practice at many of the large Italian supermarket chains (Esselunga for example) to charge for each plastic bag. The customer asks for the number of bags they want (if any) when they check out and then bags their own items while the next customer is attended to. Americans probably would resist that process but it is nice to know your bread and vegetables get packed up properly without a litre of soda being thrown on top of them.

Americans are tough customers in many respects. We rely heavily upon the media to inform us of important things and then become cynical after the media “camps out” on the topic too long. The overall issue of environmental protection and resource management needs to become more of a personal matter that is contemplated and acted upon without constant prodding from media, activists, or government. As we come to independent conclusions that not wasting our resources simply makes common sense, perhaps we will stop talking about it and start doing the many small things needed to help solve the bigger problem.

... read our Reusable Shopping Bag Buyer's Guide