Life without the plastic bag...?

[dianeduane]

Or, rather, without the flimsy semi-transparent bag with handles that cut into your hands like cheesewire if you put something in the bag that weighs more than a pound? Here in Ireland, it’s been a pleasure.

I see the concept of dumping the bag — by one mechanism or another — is being introduced in Los Angeles County now. (See this editorial at the LA Times for some details. Malibu has already brought in legislation, and I think so has San Francisco.) I see also that the normal kicking and screaming at the very concept is already ongoing — there’s actually a website called SaveThePlasticBag.com: glancing over it makes me vaguely curious to see who’s actually behind the Save The Plastic Bag Coalition, but not so curious that I’d veer off course to do anything about it on a work day.

I wouldn’t presume to dictate to people who live in a place where I no longer reside. But I can say this for sure: after the Irish dump-the-bag initiative went into action in 2002, the urban, suburban and rural Irish landscape got visibly cleaner within a matter of just a few months. Now, in terms of bags at least, both countryside and cityscapes here are unthinkably different from the way they looked looked a relatively short time ago. Not pristine, by any means. There are still a lot of Irish who’re slobs (though slowly this seems to be changing). But a main cause of litter and secondary pollution is now gone.

Five years ago, in a country that’s supposed to be famous for the beauty of its landscape and environment, you would have found it impossible to locate a country hedgerow that did not have the dirty, tattered remains of plastic bags snarled in it, fluttering in the breeze. I can’t describe how horrendous this looked. Fences were festooned with the filthy things; they were caught in trees, lay clogging roadside ditches, went blowing down every country road until they wound up in your back yard or your garden. (City streets and roads were far worse in this regard.) Sewers overflowed after getting full of them, seabirds and other wildlife got strangled by them either externally or by ripping them up and eating them; they covered the bottoms of ponds and could be found half-buried in wetlands and mired in protected peat bogs. The damn things were everywhere.

Part of the reason this happened, I believe, is because the bags were free: and as about almost any other free thing, people just got unconscious about the plastic bags and what was done with them. They didn’t matter.

Finally the government got off its butt and did something. And they did it in a very smart way: by making the bags matter. They didn’t outright ban them. They just said, “Okay, if you want them, you can have them. But you’ll have to pay for them. Not a crippling amount: just enough to concentrate your mind on the issue of whether you really need them or not.”  The charge was, as I remember, 15 cent. (Now it’s thirty-three.)

At the same time, all the major and minor grocery chains started offering more durable bags at the checkouts. They too cost money — ranging from a Euro to several Euro depending on how big the bag was — but anyone who stood at the checkout and did the math in their head quickly realized how much money they were going to save on the reusable bags.

Peter and I were really interested to see how this was going to go. We’d already been converted to the reusable-bag concept years earlier during various trips to Germany and Switzerland, where sturdy inexpensive cloth, paper, and reusable plastic bags have been on sale at the checkout for a long time. (These are also countries where you will genuinely still see people carrying their shopping around the local city markets in wicker baskets, some even with gingham linings.) We had about ten or fifteen of these strong cloth bags in the kitchen closet already. So as our local groceries started featuring the new cloth or plastic-weave bags, naturally we picked up some in the course of business. But I was particularly interested in seeing how our neighbors would take the changeover.

I was astonished to see that almost without exception, all the people in our immediate neighborhood went practically immediately to the position, “Sure I’d sooner pay for a good bag once than pay for those cheap things every week, they just pile up and make a mess: what’s the problem?”  It seems that the rest of the country went pretty much the same way: the Times article suggests that the use of disposable plastic bags dropped off by 94% “within weeks”. And this among a people who are notoriously conservative about a lot of things.

But now we have clean fields and woods and hedgerows… and significantly less litter and damage to something that’s unquestionably a national resource: the Irish landscape. As well as far less sheer waste of something that (leaving aside the issue of other environmental impact) is better not made and thrown away thoughtlessly than made and casually ditched.

So now it’ll be interesting to see what happens in LA. (It looks like IKEA’s unilateral bag fee is producing results similar to the Irish national figures.)

But meanwhile I note this page at the aforementioned save-the-plastic-bag site:

We are a California-based coalition. The initial focus of our campaign is California. However, the anti-plastic bag campaign is a worldwide problem and we want to be as helpful as we can regardless of location.

(snort)  Guys, three(ish) words for you as regards Ireland, at least:  BUTT OUT KTHXBYE.

Tags: plastic+bag, ban, fee, tax, Ireland, litter, environment, government

Comments

[robotech-master.livejournal.com]

I will say that the anti-anti-plastic-bag campaign is remarkably silly.

But I would, a bit selfishly, be a little disappointed to see the bags disappear; they're just the right size for taking care of the daily catbox hiouh disposal chore.

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Absolutely! In Western Australia, while plastic bags aren't charged for (at least not everywhere) they are being discouraged more. Certainly if you only have a few items. Reusable bags are available in nearly every major store. It's not as fully implemented in Ireland yet, but there is improvement. Certainly I have multiple reusable bags, including some nice parachute silk bags that can fold down into little pouches that fit into handbags or onto belts.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing the APBC is just someone who complains about anything the government tells them to do, even if it's something inconsequential.

I don't think we have any legislation here, but for years Canadian discount grocery stores have had a policy of charging for plastic bags, five or ten cents each, to reduce overhead costs. They provided free cardboard boxes (that food had been packed in when it came to the store) or you could bring your own bags if you didn't want to buy bags.

These days there's been something of a public campaign against plastic bags, and all the grocery stores now have their own branded reusable bags. People still use plastic ones, but not in the same quantities at all. It seems like you rarely see someone out walking doing errands without a grocery store bag. (The best one so far is from the liquor store -- it has a cloth divider so that you can carry six bottles without them clanking together.)

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I find a courier bag with a shoulder strap is perfect for the occasional trips to the Co-Op.

[lady-autumnstar.livejournal.com]

I live in a small town about 60 miles north of Atlanta, Georgia. Even here I'm seeing re-usable bags (some cheap, some not so cheap) appear near the check outs. It's a good sign. I have several that I keep in my truck, and denim to make several more large sturdy bags to use when grocery shopping. Still, I keep a few plastic bags around for small trash disposal jobs. They're just the right size to fit the bathroom trash cans.

I would think the people behind the "save the plastic bag" movement are the people who MAKE plastic bags. They're losing their business.

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

The rest of Britain is slowly following Ireland's lead. However it's not the supermarkets that still offer free plastic bags but all the smaller retailers.

I can't see why anyone would campaign for keeping them!

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I also wonder if these people opposed to bans and fees even understand how plastic bags are increasing the cost of groceries and petrol.

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

What a peculiar attitude; I suppose there is the certain personality type that considers wastefulness a sign of prosperity and sees any restrictions as the harbinger of totalitarianism...

Here in Melbourne, the major shopping chains have been offering cheap cloth bags (About a dollar each) for years, and most have policies that plastic bags will not be offered for less than a dozen items. I can't imagine why anyone would prefer the plastic bags; it's far easier to carry heavy shopping home in cloth bags. I suppose if one drives everywhere the advantage is less clear?

If nothing else, when not in use transporting groceries, one's cat can sit adorably in cloth bags pering out the top, giving them a clear advantage over plastic...

[dewline.livejournal.com]

As I recall, there's one small town in Manitoba that's banned the plastic bag outright. And the usage of the plastic bags is certainly dropping like a rock down through the ocean to its floor. Not exactly fast, not really slow, but definitely steadily. Reusage unto death seems to be part of the reason for the slower pace.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Entirely possible, even probable. And while there's still practical usages for these things, I suppose we have to keep them around. Pet waste and suchlike, as others noted.

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

Being an underage dependent, I don't buy the groceries, so I don't find myself needing to use any sort of grocery bag (just my purse-handbag-thingy) unless I stupidly decided to buy a two-liter bottle of pop without bringing a decent bag to carry it home in.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I'd much rather people bought their own plastic bags for those purposes, rather than them being paid for by a surplus on grocery shopping for everyone.

[st-aurafina.livejournal.com]

Our little country town went plastic-bag free - all the local retailers got together and made it a town-wide initiative and worked it into the tourism aspect of the town. And what you say about the fields looking cleaner is very true - in months, we had less rubbish blowing around the roads. And the next year, the tiny river that runs behind the shopping centre was one of the few waterways in south-west Victoria to have a breeding colony of platypuses move in. (Platypi?)

People grumbled while the proposal was going through, but once it was in place, and every business had cloth bags on sale the grumbling died down really fast.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

>>I would think the people behind the "save the plastic bag" movement are the people who MAKE plastic bags. They're losing their business.<<

So, an "Astroturf" group (as opposed to true grassroots)? :-)

[mirien.livejournal.com]

My feeling on this one is that people feel a little bit helpless about the things they feel they can do as regards the environment. Reducing their use of plastic bags though is something real and tangible they can do every day and feel good about as well as seeing their surroundings improve. I think the effect of people feeling they are 'doing their bit' can never be underestimated and it's great!

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Perhaps not astroturfing as such.

A little judicious searching (http://whois.domaintools.com/savetheplasticbag.com) reveals that the site is registered to someone named Stephen Joseph. He seems to be a lawyer (this page (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/05/12/OREO.TMP) describes him as "a public interest lawyer") resident in the San Francisco area. Further searches suggest he may own as many as 40+ other domains: interestingly, one of them is stop-trans-fat.com (http://www.stop-trans-fat.com/bantransfats.html). Apparently he recently filed a lawsuit against Nabisco to get them to remove the transfats from Oreos, or something similar. ETA: this news story (http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1217044520193670.xml&coll=7) confirms that he was hired by plastic-bag manufacturers.

...Maybe he feels the world is being unfair to plastic bags. Or (here comes my cynical streak) that banning them would interfere with another venture he's seems to be involved in, a bag-recycling effort called Stripes2Stripes. (http://stripes2stripes.org/index.html)

(shrug) I may look into this further in a couple of weeks if I have time. Right now I'm filing the guy under "gadfly, multilateral, optionally for hire" and getting back to restructuring the outline for this movie. :)

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

Ontario has been campaigning against the plastic bag for a couple of years, and most of the major grocery chains and some other major retail groups have been selling inexpensive bags in the $C1-$C5 dollar range starting then.

OT

[dark_fishie]

icon love! =D

[dark_fishie]

WORD! I like your county!

Unfortunately my parents shop at stores that still hand out plastic bags. We can use empty rice bags but I'm not sure if the cashiers will use them.

[azurelunatic]

My (US-based) household has converted to reusable bags at least a quarter of the time, and would probably make the switch all the way (unless caught without a bag for some reason) if there were a charge. Right now we wind up saving them and using them as garbage bags and anti-leak tote bags for things that are wet.

[were-gopher.livejournal.com]

Tesco are not only selling cheap reusable bags but are also giving extra loyalty points for each bag you reuse. I think they work it by how many plastic bags you would have used as you get different points depending on the size of the bag.

They've now extended that to their delivery service so you get extra points for having stuff just stacked in the delivery boxes instead of having it bagged first. Now the only stuff that gets bagged is things like packs of raw meat and cleaning products so that any risk of cross contamination with the rest of your shopping is reduced.

[meryddian.livejournal.com]

I live in Chicago. There's been some rumbling about banning or at least charging for plastic bags here, and I'm all for it. When I go to the mainstream grocery stores, they tend to *double bag* plastic bags -- so on a "heavy" grocery day, I may end up going home with 20 plastic bags!

But there's another grocery chain in the US called Trader Joe's. They only offer paper or reusable bags. I've bought several of their reuseable bags (99 cents each) and keep them handy in my kitchen and trunk. National chain Whole Foods also recently eliminated using plastic bags chain-wide also; you can get paper or buy a reusable bag for 99 cents.

One night I was in Whole Foods and I had brought two Trader Joe's bags with me. The lady who was bagging for my cashier spoke Spanish, and while I don't speak enough Spanish to understand everything she said, I could tell she was saying something about my reusable bags being a competing supermarket. The cashier looked at me sheepishly (after all, you never know who speaks your language, and Spanish is one of the more common choices for most bilingual people in the US, I'd think) and I said, "yeah, they're not Whole Foods bags, but at least they're reusable, eh?"

On the cat box issue: The plastic containers the litter comes in is the perfect receptacle for the job, if the opening on the jug is large enough.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

I like that they're offering reusables for sale in supermarkets in the UK, and you see more people carrying their groceries in the big hemp bags, partially because they don't kill your hands in the same way (I carry a small cotton one around that fits most casual lunchtime shopping). I just bloody wish more places charged. Or asked. I know Tescos has that policy of 'use your own and you get a point' - but I still have to tell the checkout girl to take my stuff *out* of the plastic bag she's automatically put it in. This happens especially in the tiny Tesco Metros, where all you're getting is a yogurt or a sandwich. I know the official language is 'do you need a bag', but maybe the onus should be that they don't even offer a bag unless you specifically ask for one. And then they charge you for it.

Re: OT

[lady-autumnstar.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[shauna-lee.livejournal.com]

In Washington State we're at this moment volunteering to change over, but rumor has it a 20-cent plastic bag fee will be going into effect soon. So, with this warning in mind, many people here in Seattle (a notoriously "green" city) have already bought their reuseable cloth grocery bags and are currently enjoying our 3-cent-a-bag bribe/discount to bring our own bags with us to the store. I think it's a great idea, and I appreciate the time to get used to the whole thign and make it a habit before my occasional forgetful slip ends up costing me.