Sustainability - Reusable Bags vs Single Use Plastic Bags

Single use plastic shopping bags are not part of a sustainable future. They:

• Are made from a non-renewable resource
• Can only be recycled if they are clean
• Do no biodegrade very rapidly
• Are hazards to wildlife - both on land and in water

Here is how I’m avoiding the single use plastic shopping bags completely.

Avoiding plastic shopping bags from grocery shopping has been a story of ongoing improvement for me. The first step was to remember the ‘bag-of-bags’ for the major grocery shopping trips. I’ve been doing that for a few years now.

Then I started carrying a thin fabric bag folded in a pocket of my purse and that enabled another reduction in the rate of plastic bag accumulation in my home over the past year or so. My husband started carrying a bag in his car but kept forgetting to take it into the store until we got one that was a brighter color that folded flat to fit in the pocket of the driver’s side door of his car. Now he uses his reusable bag the majority of the time.

Recently I started the next reduction in plastic bags: using reusable mesh bags for veggies (like the potatoes, sweet potatoes, and parsnips in the picture). In the past, all the reusable type bags I tried in the produce section were a failure because the labels from the scales would not stick to the material. Now I am used some large safety pins that I’ve had for over 20 years to hold the labels in place.

I know I’m making progress because it takes me a very long time to collect one small bag of plastic bags for recycling. Most of them are not shopping bags (they are bags from flyers/papers delivered to the driveway, bread wrappers, or plastic bags over boxes delivered to the doorstep on a rainy day).

Ultimately - my goal is to have no single use plastic shopping bags to take back to the grocery store for recycling…and I’m getting very close to that goal!