photo credit: ecopromosonline.com

Everywhere you go now, you can find those “eco-bags” available around every corner, in every shop.  It’s one of those fads that everyone seems to buy into, but it makes me wonder if it’s worth all the hype.  Sure, it’s great to have sturdy bags like that that you can use and reuse time and time again.  But the problem is, a solution like that doesn’t quite work without the full commitment of the people as well.  They’ve got to change their behavior to match the goals of producing those reusable tote bags: conservation.  If everyone used just one or two of those bags with every grocery run (or even any sort of shopping), a lot can be saved.  But the problem is, people are getting these things, then forgetting to bring them along to use each time they go out.  Every now and then they may decide to just get another one and use them all the next time.  But of course, without a change in habits, you’ll never get around to it.

I was reminded of this when I read about a lady who has reached the brink and decided she has enough of these bags now.  It’s more harmful to overproduce these bags than the cheap plastic ones we’ve grown accustomed to.  After all, they require more material and certainly more energy to create.  If people still use too many of them, the problem we have doesn’t go away – it merely mutates.  So, recently, I have made sure that whenever Panda and I go shopping for food, we bring our collection of reusable bags or suffer the consequences of having to carry everything we bought with no bags (or maybe just one to be used for collecting trash in).  We also walk to the store, which is a 15- to 20-minute trip by foot.  After spending the time and energy to get there only to find we forgot to bring bags, it’s a personal punishment to not use bags as a way of drilling that habit into our routine.  Lately I’ve begun to hang the bags on the door so it’s harder to disregard them as we head out the door and it’s been working!  I’ve become more conscious of the steps to take before going out to buy some food.

photo credit: ilovecostco.com

Costco’s a great place that does away with the whole bag concept and uses boxes, if anything, to pack up your cart.  Though it never hit me until Panda mentioned it, perhaps I like that place for that very fact (and of course the fact that they offer bulk items).  It works really well because the type of bags they’d have to get to hold the items they sell really isn’t worth all the waste it would create (though I’m sure they’d make great doubles as large trash bags).  I think all stores should either do away with bags or start charging a premium that will really make people rethink (what would that take? A quarter a bag? A dollar a bag?).  Any bags used should also be biodegradable, so people can take them home, use them for trash, then not worry about them clogging up the landfills permanently.  The SunChips people have this great new compostable bag coming out that is completely biodegradable within weeks!  Wouldn’t it be awesome if supermarkets used that kind of material?

Next step is to start bringing my own mugs and bottles to be filled when I get fast food.