June 5th, 2009 · No Comments

By Sommer Saadi
Green Right Now

As I unloaded my groceries onto the conveyor belt, I realized I was buying more than could fit in my reusable bags.

“Can you try to fit everything in these?” I asked, handing over my assortment of canvas totes.

“I can try,” the cashier answered. “But it’s no big deal, I can just use plastic bags for whatever we can’t fit into  the ones you brought.”

“Oh no,” I said. “No plastic bags. Please.”

She stared back at me. She had already stretched out a plastic bag and was ready to load.

“I have this thing,” I told her. “I just really hate plastic bags.”

I wasn’t lying. I really do hate plastic bags, and I was on the last day of my one-week challenge to only use reusable bags for every purchase I made.  I wasn’t going to let the two gallons of milk, a watermelon and a Gatorade six-pack that wouldn’t fit in my totes stop me.

“Just put the stuff that doesn’t fit right into the cart,” I told her.

I made it to the car and my groceries made it to my home without the help of a plastic bag. I learned after going a week without them, shopping bags were simply unnecessary.

I got used to the idea of refusing plastic bags at the grocery store during the year I studied in London. Some stores would charge you if you needed a plastic bag while others would give you credit if you brought your own. And it made sense to bring a sturdier bag since you’d most likely be walking your groceries back home.

Carrying a reusable bag in London was trendy and cool. The U.K. is the birthplace of the ubiquitous “I’m Not A Plastic Bag” tote created by activist organization We Are What We Do, which encourages people to use small, daily actions to change the world.

Reusablebags.com reports an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to more than one million per minute. And the bags that get dumped pollute soil and water sources and are the cause of death for thousands of animals each year. Plastic bags do not biodegrade. They photodegrade, which means they break down into smaller and smaller pieces that contaminate the environment.

And paper bags aren’t much better. Research shows that more greenhouse gases are emitted during the manufacturing and transporting of paper bags than plastic bags. So the best solution is to use a reusable bag.

So the What We Do organization asked British bag guru Anya Hindmarch to create an affordable and environmentally friendly bag people could use instead of plastic or paper bags. And when 20,000 of them were released at 450 supermarkets across England in 2007, women got in line at 2 a.m. and all were sold by 9 a.m. Women in the States had a similar reaction. Within three hours of it being offered for the first time across the U.S., it had sold out of every Anya Hindmarch boutique across the nation.

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