The Single Use Plastic Bag Blues

I love to visit Mexico. I like the climate, most things about the culture, and it's nearby. Possibly my least favorite part is one that's most obvious in the open desert: the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag. Festooning (or is it infesting?) the low growing shrubs, hanging on by their well-designed handles, blowing sideways in the wind. My (ex) brother in law had an apt turn of phrase for it. He said “The Bag Bushes are in bloom.” Of course, we're far from immune on this side of the border. The sheer quantity of discarded bags is less here but not the eyesore-ness.

Not to mention the sheer waste. Plastic food store shopping bags, made from HDPE – high density polyethylene – are made from natural gas. About 600 BTUs worth. That's a relatively small amount; a therm, the unit of natural gas we see on our monthly utility bills, is 100,000 BTUs and we only pay a couple of bucks for that. But let's multiply that by roughly one hundred billion, the number of single-use plastic shopping bags made and used each year in the US. I think numbers are more graphic than the written word here: 100,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeros.  Multiply that by 600 BTUs and, well, you can do the math.

A few quick facts to bludgeon the subject with: World wide, there are roughly a trillion bags produced every year. More than 97% are thrown away. 10% or so eventually make it in to the ocean, where they drift for years or sink to the bottom. One report estimates that every square mile of the ocean averages 46,000 floating pieces of plastic. When a plastic bag does eventually start to break down, it releases BPA, PCBs, and other nasties which are known hormone mimics or are implicated in cancer. 4% of the entire world's oil production goes to making plastic bags. An average car driving one mile uses the same amount of energy as it takes to make 14 single use plastic bags. An estimated one billion seabirds and sea mammals are killed every year by ingesting plastic. The numbers are staggering.

Oddly enough, one thing that's worse is paper. It takes more than 4 times as much energy to create a paper bag than a plastic one and it takes twice as much energy to recycle a paper bag as plastic.  The plastic/paper choice at the checkout stand is not so easy.

Which brings us to reusable bags. As you can guess, they're not all made the same. Polypropylene, cotton, HDPE, LDPE, they each have their own sized carbon footprint. Cotton, though the best feeling of the lot, takes roughly a hundred uses to pay for itself at the '600 BTUs/single use plastic bag' rate. If you wash your cotton bags, the payback pushes off even further. It turns out that the simple polypropylene bag is the most ecologically economical, with a payback of 4 to 6 uses.

Other countries are far ahead of the US in the push to eradicate the invasive desert 'bag bushes'. California requires food stores to provide bag recycling, which could be considered a start. San Francisco was the first American city to actually ban plastic bags even though opponents argued, with some validity, that the ban would actually increase pollution. Seattle followed soon after by charging a fee per plastic bag used.

Other countries, though were far ahead of the U.S. Australia, many African countries, China, and Europe have all been controlling plastic bag use and production for much of the last decade.

So why are we still using so many?  I'm a perfect example of American laziness.  Half the time I forget to put my reusable shopping bags back in the car after I unload in my kitchen.  And even when I remember to take them in to the store, I still tear off two or three of those clear vegetable bags to hold my vegetables on the way to the checkout. Why? Why is it so hard for me to completely shake those Single Use Plastic Bag Blues?

I've just realized part of what I want from writing this: embarrassment. I want to stand there in the checkout line and know you are watching me with my vegetables in plastic bags. Of course it's silly, but if it's that little extra internal push that helps me remember my reusable shopping bags, I'll use it. Similar to smoking, peer pressure is what will make the plastic bag choice visible. I'm ready to change my behavior, to do my part in making reusable bags the social norm.

Somehow, I suspect our grandkids would thank us for it.