It’s time for BYOB! Yes, bring your own shopping bag! While we continue our journey throughout a busy 2010, it’s outrageous to think about the amount of shopping we traditionally do here in America and world-wide. Whether it be numerous visits to the supermarket as we keep our kitchen’s stocked for magnificent meals and tasty goodies or those sometimes dreaded (yet skillful) “6 bags on each arm” walks through the local mall, it all adds up to a whole lot of unnecessary garbage. One of the most blatant examples of this waste is disposable shopping bags.
An estimated 100 billion plastic shopping bags are used each year within the USA, according to the Wall-Street Journal. Most plastic bags end up in landfills furthermore the rest often end up in rivers, ponds, lakes, streams or in the ocean, where animals can swallow or become entangled in them. Considering the number of shopping bags that are consumed and wasted each year, the time is now to extend the word about the constructive benefits of eco friendly reusable bags. After all, the majority of us desire to give back to our families, friends and communities as often as possible.
Creating a BYOB strategy in our individual shopping habits is a straightforward way to do exactly that. If we could elevate awareness presently, the positive impact for the environment is incalculable for 2010 and well into the future. Several cities have already made gradual but momentous progress in promoting the usage of eco friendly bags in recent years. Encouraging 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 now in America, the San Jose City Council recently approved among the nation’s strictest bans on plastic and paper shopping bags. It is a big victory for the Bay Area, that has 1 million plastic bags per year accumulating in and along the San Francisco Bay. San Jose becomes the most recent bay area city to enact some kind 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 truly jump-started the ban, an additional impressive instance of the influence 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 places in the district 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 recovered in a single 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 metropolitan areas have banned plastic bags to date, five in the past year. Even Mexico City enacted a ban on plastic shopping bags, which went into effect in August. The city of 20 million at this moment faces the realities of effective enforcement, which isn’t simple when the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce estimates there’s 35,000 vendors in Mexico City’s downtown area alone.
Bans on plastic bags aren’t really the only valuable way to scale back detrimental waste brought on by disposable bags. PlasTaxes, which tax customers at the register for using plastic bags while shopping, were primarily launched by the Irish. John Roach of National Geographic reported in 2008 relating to the worldwide momentum that’s been building from the time when Ireland instituted a PlasTax in 2003. The Irish showed they could cut down plastic bag consumption by 90% or more. Momentum is rising the world over, predominantly in America. From Washington, DC to Edmonds, WA to North Pole, AK, communities and governments are spurring a global trend to reduce the damaging environmental effects of disposable shopping bags. In the great state of Hawaii, the governing body is at this time considering a bill to ban single-use plastic bags (SUP), or to establish a small fee to utilize SUP bags.
Even key retail stores like Target and CVS are taking action by enacting discounts at the register for customers who decide to BYOB or just carry-out their stuff without a bag. For those naysayers, it’s opportune to pay no attention to recent momentum in reducing disposable bag waste. But to some, the wide-spread adoption of recycled grocery bags is inevitable. Examine the way smoking is becoming taboo in America. Indoor smoking bans have caught on like wild-fire. In the same way, who’s to say using disposable bags won’t become taboo at some point within the (hopefully near) future? The use of eco-friendly recycled grocery bags is definitely gaining steam. Our individual choices to take our recycled shopping bags can go a lot farther than we think. That’s what BYOB is all about.
Naturally, plastic and paper bags ought to be recycled and it’s crucial to remember a bunch of 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 approach can make your life much less difficult because there is no longer a need to accumulate that cabinet full of plastic bags or determine what and when to deal with it. Keeping a few wholesale eco bags in your car or backpack is a great way to make sure you have them when required. Thus give back this year by remembering to BYOB! No matter whether it be at a convenience store, the mall, or while grocery shopping, we can make a change for the environment and help raise consciousness one transaction at a time. In the struggle to eliminate disposable shopping bag waste, 2010 is our moment.
