Guest Entry: Paper Bag it or the Back of the Line for You

By: Maria Rainier
                                                                                              Image credit: Photos Public Domain
We all do it – go to the grocery store and forget to bring our reusable grocery bags. Oops, I’ll just have to remember next time. But in some states and countries and maybe soon everywhere, using plastic bags won’t be an option. San Francisco started the trend in 2007, banning plastic bags in grocery stores – according to a story covered by NPR in 2008, other cities, states and countries are jumping on the bandwagon to ban the use of plastic bags.

There are many conveniences to using plastics bags: they are lightweight, cheap, easy to use, always  available and always convenient. Banning these conveniences seems like a major inconvenience to most people, but the impact of plastic bags on the environment is what’s most inconvenient.

The harmful effects of plastic bags on the environment:

1.Plastic bags litter the landscape and if burned, produce toxic fumes
2.Plastic bags are non-biodegradable and stick around for about 1,000 years, long after landfills
3. Plastic bags kill animals through ingestion and strangulation
4. Petroleum is used to produce plastic bags – we need petroleum unfortunately

How many times have you driven by a park, parking lot, garden or anywhere else and seen a plastic bag just sitting there, glued to another unobtrusive object? Unobtrusive may have been a bad descriptor for a plastic bag; in all reality, there’s nothing unobtrusive about it.

How many times have you been accosted or surprised by a plastic bag flying in your face or seen one floating into space. In fact, a major part of the film American Beauty, where the boy says to Jane it is “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed,” is about a plastic bag. Really? If that’s beautiful then Ricky, you need to get out more.

Many cities and countries have already started banning the use of plastic bags in supermarkets and stores:

• San Jose recently passed a ban on the usage of plastic bags and many surrounding cities are following the ordinance.
• Last November, parts of L.A. banned single-use and disposable plastic bags to 1.1 million people
• In August 2009, Mexico City banned the use of plastic bags from check-out lines at supermarkets
• In January, Muntinlupa City in the Philippines banned plastic bags & polystyrene containers
• Michigan is starting a movement and petition to ban plastic bag usage in their state
• Last October, an ordinance went into affect banning plastic bags from the Outer Banks of Dare, Currituck and Hyde counties.

Click here for a detailed list of these countries’ Plastic Bag Laws.

Plastic bags may be convenient for our daily lives but they are detrimental to the environment and when we start taking these environmental risks into consideration, only then will we be able to do something about it. The citizens who helped start the movement back in 2007 in San Francisco, probably started by voluntarily banning themselves from the use of plastic bags because starting a movement starts with yourself.

I have recently chosen to ban myself from using plastic bags as well – it’s simple really. I put reusable bags in my car for when I go grocery shopping and in the event that I forget them, I make myself buy news one to bring home my new purchases in. Having to buy a reusable bag that I already have at home is my way of punishing myself – I would rather go broke, due to my own forgetfulness, than punish the environment.

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, where she's been looking into gender wage gap statistics to see if it can be explained through women choosing lower paying degrees and men choosing higher paying degrees. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.