When you're going through the checkout line, most cashiers no longer bother to ask, "Paper or plastic?" Everything goes right into the plastic bags hanging from the dispeners conveniently placed right in front of them, with the paper bags usually hidden from view under the counter. Paper bags have their own drawbacks, but at least they don't take 1,000 years to decompose.
Fortunately, we have another choice altogether -- the reusable bags that are taking grocery store clerks by storm. Granted, you have to be quick with those trigger-happy plastic baggers, like placing your bags before your groceries on the conveyor belt, or blurting out "I've got bags!" before you can even squeeze in a friendly hello.
Though more and more people switch to reusable bags every day, it's impossible to ignore the countless grocery carts rolling out of stores with 10+ plastic bags filled with food that you know would have fit into four or five of those roomy reusable bags of your own.
"The average American family of four tosses out about 1,500 plastic sacks a year," write author David de Rothschild in The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook's Essential Skill #38: Choose the Right Bag. "Most of these [plastic] bags aren't biodegrading; the plastic just breaks up into tinier and tinier bits until it leaches into the soil or water."
Some cities are taking matters into their own hands, banning plastic bags altogether. But we shouldn't need laws to make such a smart, simple choice.
"There are an estimated 500 billion to one trillion new plastic bags used every year. That's as many as two million per minute," writes de Rothschild. "If one million people switched to reusable bags, we'd eliminate the need for one billion plastic bags."
If you have yet to make the switch, make it now. And if you tend to forget your bags at home, keep extras in the car. You can get them from most grocery stores, but they tend to be flimsy and are rarely made from recycled materials. Check out these durable reusable bag designs made from recycled cotton, plastic bottles and containers at ReusableBags.com.
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Though it seems to take some baggers and checkers by surprise when you tell them not to bother, there are items that don't need to be bagged at all -- like big packages of toilet paper, sacks of potatoes, or a big bag of carrots. A bagger put a watermelon in one of our reusable bags and it fell out the bottom. The watermelon survived, but with something like a big jar of pickles, that could be a real mess!
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