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for a product that didn't even exist just a few decades ago.
^^^^The USA has the safest water supply in the world, how did we get to the point of bottled water when every home has running water? I am guilty at times of picking up a case but it is usually for road use. I use to carry around a gallon jug but it would go stale before I finished it.
When I was young and worked outdoors we always had one of those big orange Igloo water kegs and filled it with a couple of bags of ice on the way to work and sometimes cut up some oranges, limes or lemons to toss in for flavor. It would get refilled several times a day.
When we shop at the next city over that has a ban, we sometimes forget to bring in our bags. A nickel is not worth going all the way back to the car for. We see more people paying it than with their own bags. It's just not a factor.
The real problem now being discovered is the lack of sanitation in reusable bags.
I tried to wash the store reusable bags and most of the time, they don't hold up very well. I sew my own bags - cotton with cotton lining so I can throw them in the wash. When i made my bags , I made the handles extra long so I can throw all of them over my shoulders......
My husband isn't as good about remembering to use the resuable bags. He can end up 30 plastic bags from a grocery or Walmart run....
I tried to wash the store reusable bags and most of the time, they don't hold up very well. I sew my own bags - cotton with cotton lining so I can throw them in the wash. When i made my bags , I made the handles extra long so I can throw all of them over my shoulders......
There are many kinds of reusable bags available. I like the ones made of light canvas, very well stitched. I have washed them numerous times over the couple of years I've had them, and they're still going strong. ironically, I have to tie a knot in the handles to shorten them, otherwise they tend drag on the ground when I'm walking.
I also have another one that has semi-rigid side made of a coated fabric. It ingeniously folds down to a flat package the size of a thin book that is very convenient for me to tote along when I'm out for a walk and I just want to be able to pick up a few things if the mood strikes me. And it's particularly handy if a neighbor puts out some nice produce from their garden at their little self-serve stand, as several do.
Three years ago when I lived on a farm in Iowa I posted about how plastic grocery bags littered the farm fields in the spring. They were everywhere! That farm was about 6 miles to the nearest town of about 10,000. Where did all those bags blow in from???
This year when I went down to my farm in Illinois in April I noticed the same thing - the tilled soil was spotted with plastic grocery store bags. It's especially noticeable in the Spring because the fields are freshly tilled with nothing growing yet. That farm is about 15 miles from a town with a grocery store. So those bags travel far! I was so disgusted.
If this doesn't bother you, it should, because it means that plastic is in your food supply.
Besides, that shtuff can clog up and ruin the outrageously expensive machinery we use.
I used to use those plastic grocery bags for cat poop, but never, ever again. Now I buy a biodegradable brand for cat poop and uncompostable stuff.
And people who buy plastic bags for lawn debris are flat out nutty. But it will take a while to wean people away from the habit.
Yes, that's a very good observation. While our city still allows plastic bags the bigger city next to us has banned them and we have to use our own bags. Now I'm thinking it would be fun to use plastic kitchen trash bags to carry my groceries. We buy those and the 33 gallon ones for the big garbage can at Costco but we do see people at Home Depot buy a box of them and bring a nice cloth bag for their smaller items. We also notice that people have to buy small plastic bags to pick up their dog walking poop there now, since they no longer have the grocery bags for that purpose.
Here, the city does not like it when trash is thrown in the trashcan without being in some kind of container. Loose pieces blow out and a portion doesn't end up in the trash truck. And really drippy things or your cat litter or the meat you pulled out of the freezer when it defrosted itself will smell forever if you dump it in alone. So what else would you use? And I use the plastic bags for a LOT of things, storage especially. They get holes in them easily but so long as its things which aren't going to fall through, then they still work. They don't hit the trash until they are scraps. The puppy usually helps with that, alas. Just be careful what drops on the floor.
I wish we had the two/three cans and they DID recycle but that's a lot more profitable for larger cities since the amoung they get for most of it isn't much, and it goes to pay for the recyclying bin and extra truck. But where I used to live in socal we had several million people, here we barely have 10k. There's some places in town which take free recylables and metal can be sold, but our numbers aren't going to pay for the overhead.
I'd not be hapy if we had plastic banned but would look up online and find someone who sold them cheap and buy my own supply to take to the store. If I get meat in a package that can drip, or chicken, I'm not putting it in a cloth bag to drip all over but not enough its necessarily going to be noticed it has to be washed before being used again. There are *good* reasons to have plastic too.
If I get meat in a package that can drip, or chicken, I'm not putting it in a cloth bag to drip all over but not enough its necessarily going to be noticed it has to be washed before being used again. There are *good* reasons to have plastic too.
This is the most common misconception people have about the bans on flimsy plastic shopping bags. The smaller plastic bags that meat and chicken and wet produce are put in to prevent drips are still allowed. But they are much smaller, and are used in smaller quantities than shopping bags, and consequently are a far smaller problem.
And the simple illustration of what that dynamic is, when I do a heavy shopping run for myself I take 4 reusable shopping bags with me, about the size of traditional paper shopping bags, and I typically come out with about 3 1/2 bags of groceries. But the same quantity of items used to take 10 to 12 of the flimsy plastic bags to get out to my car, and then home. It's that excessive waste... remember, studies have shown that overall more than 90% of those bags never get reused, but merely get wadded up and tossed in the garbage... and the fact that so many people are so careless with them, that makes it worthwhile to get them out of the waste stream.
And one of the fringe benefits is that the bag bans increase the visibility of the entire reduce/reuse/recycle mantra of waste management today, and overall understanding and compliance goes up.
Three years ago when I lived on a farm in Iowa I posted about how plastic grocery bags littered the farm fields in the spring. They were everywhere! That farm was about 6 miles to the nearest town of about 10,000. Where did all those bags blow in from???
This year when I went down to my farm in Illinois in April I noticed the same thing - the tilled soil was spotted with plastic grocery store bags. It's especially noticeable in the Spring because the fields are freshly tilled with nothing growing yet. That farm is about 15 miles from a town with a grocery store. So those bags travel far! I was so disgusted.
If this doesn't bother you, it should, because it means that plastic is in your food supply.
Besides, that shtuff can clog up and ruin the outrageously expensive machinery we use.
I used to use those plastic grocery bags for cat poop, but never, ever again. Now I buy a biodegradable brand for cat poop and uncompostable stuff.
And people who buy plastic bags for lawn debris are flat out nutty. But it will take a while to wean people away from the habit.
What you really should worry about is people who change their engine oil and simply dump it onto the ground or dig a hole and dispose of it that way.
Happens far more often than you think.
Banning plastic is fine if there is a good alternative. Simply banning something only creates other problems. The people who simply allow plastic bags to get into the environment also do a lot of other things than damage it.
Banning guns never stopped murders, banning drinking and driving never stopped drunks from killing people.
Fix the problem and stop dealing with end results.
When you are ill, do you want the physician to just deal with the symptoms of find the root cause and fix that?
When you car needs tires do you just drive slower or do you get new tires?
Banning plastic is like coasting when your fuel tank is nearly empty. Eventually the car stops moving. Fix the problem.
Boy, if you can think of a way to "fix" lazy careless people you are qualified for sainthood and are smarter than any human ever has been throughout history.
Until then, we have to take what measures we can to begin to solve a problem.
I'd like to see some farm fields in states where the grocery plastic has been banned. If those fields are clear in the Spring, then we will know that banning plastic grocery bags HAS helped to solve a real problem.
So if you live in Washington and whichever other places have a plastic grocery bag ban, go out in the fields in late winter/early spring and tell us what you see!
That would be using our noggins and the scientific method instead of just spouting off our emotions.
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