So, your reusable grocery bags will kill you in the long run?

If you live in the USA, then there is one more hazard that you need to worry about if you are one of the conscientious who takes reusable bags to the grocery stores.

First, why one more hazard?  Because, I already blogged about this one, and that was more than two years ago!

Second, why in the US and not elsewhere?  Because, ahem, we are all being very fashionable about it, as if we care more for the environment than others, when the reality is that in most countries, people almost always take their own bags.  Now, thanks to us, others are also picking up this bad plastic bag habit.

Come on, you know where this is from!

So, after those clarifications, may I bring to your attention that latest hazard if you take reusable bags to grocery stores?

It was clear that shoppers who brought their own bags were more likely to replace nonorganic versions of goods like milk with organic versions. So one green action led to another. But those same people were also more likely to buy foods like ice cream, chips, candy bars, and cookies. They weren’t replacing other items with junk food, as they did with organic food. They were just adding it to their carts.

Yep, that's right. You take those bags and you end up buying more junk food.  How about that!

In consumer psychology the word “licensing” is the key. If I behave well in one situation, I give myself license to misbehave in another, unrelated situation. Similar research has also been done on health decisions. I get a Diet Coke; I treat myself to a hamburger. In this case bringing a bag makes you think you’re environmentally friendly, so you get some ice cream. You feel you’ve earned it.

Apparently we have decided that we either litter the world with plastic bags, or litter our digestive systems with junk food.  We litter, therefore we are!

I suspect that as bringing reusable bags becomes a widespread practice, it’s likely these effects will change. Look at bottle recycling. It used to be that you felt as if you were doing a good thing by recycling bottles. Now it’s to the point where you don’t get a cookie for recycling them; you just get penalized if you don’t. You get nasty stares.

Oh, ok, we just need to ride out the temporary issues then.  There is hope?  Not so fast, because:

The dollar value of the indulgence relative to the entire basket’s value tends to be low. But the nature of the food—high calorie, high fat—may be the more important factor, not how much it costs. The effect does dissipate as indulgences get more expensive. Then there’s a whole other, nonfood aspect to it. Is lavender-scented laundry soap an indulgence? Maybe. We limited our focus to food.

In this research, they looked only at food items purchased.  So, who knows how much we truly indulge ourselves just because we feel awesome at having been environmentally responsible enough to take reusable bags!

We humans are one interesting bunch of animals, yes.  An orangutan wouldn't be this fascinating.  Wait, are we being manipulated by Dr. Zaius?

One word--Plastics. Plus one word--Ban. Equals two words--No Sense

Way back in high school, in one of Harold Robbins' many potboilers that I read, the plot involved a young man who was f*ing around with a young woman and her mother too.  Yes,  I read Dickens and Dostoevsky and also Robbins and Chase (James Hadley) and others; go figure!

A couple of years after that, sometime soon after coming to the US, I watched The Graduate in which the Dustin Hoffman character also, well, you know the story.

No, this is not about some strange young man with a mother-daughter sex triangle.  Stay with me.  In the highly sheltered existence of mine, those kind of things happened only in the fictional worlds, which is why they did not bother me at all.  Thus, what really impressed me in that movie with the glorious Simon/Garfunkel score was the scene in which the young graduate receives that advice in one word: plastics. Not the love or the sex story.

Ah, those were simpler times.  An era in which me the starving graduate student taking ziplock bags to India was a big achievement.  Plastics!

A few years ago, I was pleasantly shocked to notice that the vendor who was selling mangoes off his cart in Chennai was bagging a customer's purchase in plastic bags that he had.  The flower lady had plastic bags. And so did every seller, from the pavement to fancy stores.  Plastics had reached India, big time.

A couple of years ago, my neighbor went to Mali to volunteer his expertise in installing expensive medical equipment.  When he came back, his travel stories began with a question: "do you know what the national flower of Mali is?"  I had no freaking clue, of course.  "Plastic bags" he chuckled.  "They are everywhere on the street, on the trees, on open grounds."  He was unhappy with the littering he saw in Mali.

Meanwhile, in India, cows that looked like they had big stomachs turned out to be inflated because they had ingested a whole lot of plastic bags that were choking their stomachs.  And, yes, plastic bags had replaced the lotus as the flower of the country.

But, I don't ever think that the plastic bags are the greatest environmental threat ever--there are far worse things that I want to tackle first before banning the bags.  Not that I use a whole bunch of bags either--a long time ago I had switched over to reusable bags, which I regularly wash ;)

However, activism and politics are less about carefully thinking through and more about emotions and symbolic acts.  This, the great state of California and environmental activists passed a statewide ban on plastic bags.  Hallelujah!  All environmental problems solved!  Yeah, right!

It's a mildly positive step for the planet — especially if the goal is to cut down on plastic waste. But the disproportionate emphasis on plastic bags among people who care about the environment is also a bit misplaced. If you want to use your shopping choices to benefit wildlife and the environment as a whole, the type of bag you use is far less important than what you put inside it.

So, how would we then approach it rationally?  We would rank the practices that damage the flora and fauna by the order of their magnitude and then begin to focus on the worst ones first, right?

Not so, when it comes to activism or the politicians who are all about symbolism.

As an example, consider a vegetarian who prefers plastic bags versus a carnivore who wants to ban plastic bags.  Ready?

Isn't that picture worth a gazillion words?

These numbers can vary based on agricultural techniques, shipping methods, and other factors, but when you compare plastic bags with food, it's not even close. Yet for whatever reason, we associate plastic bags — but not food production — with environmental degradation.

Many fanatical environmentalists I know, especially among the left-leaning in academe, are also big time "nonveg" people.  They mouth the rhetoric, drive their expensive Prisues, travel to far away places to appreciate the natural settings there, yet, without seeing no environmental contradictions in their lives, eagerly champion banning plastic bags and plastic water bottles and ...

On top of all this, if plastic bag bans like California's end up causing people to use more paper bags — instead of bringing their reusable ones to the store — it'll certainly end up being worse for the environment. Research shows that making a paper bag consumes about four times more energy than a plastic bag, and produces about four times more waste if it's not recycled. 

When it comes to both climate change and trash production, eliminating plastic bags is a symbolic move, not a substantial one.

Oh well.  It provided material for a commentary! ;)  Maybe I should forget all about the plastic bags and, instead, watch The Graduate again.

My washed reusable bags won't kill me. A bullet could, right NRA?

A week ago, for the first time ever, I washed, along with the regular laundry load, the two reusable bags that I have been using for a few years now.  These are bags that I take to the grocery store, and to the university too when I have a whole bunch of papers to return to students.  The bags are no ordinary ones, but are from the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers, and many times the grocery store clerks have paused to read the lettering on the bags related to the meeting and the association.

Now, there is a good chance that I wouldn't have washed those bags, perhaps never, if it hadn't been for this news item in my RSS feed a couple of days before that laundry day:

Are the bacteria living in reusable grocery bags making us sick? A new study finds that plastic bag bans may be causing an uptick in emergency room visits and even deaths from common foodborne bacteria like coliform and E.coli.

To some extent, I am a hygiene-freak, yes.  I wash my hands, a lot. I have hand-sanitizers in my car and in my office at work.  Thus, when I read those sentences, I made a note to myself to wash those reusable bags.

It makes sense, when we think about it: an unwashed bag that we use will keep collecting dirt and bacteria.  Not rocket science, really.  But, it did take a study to remind us about that!

 San Francisco passed America's "first-in-the-nation" ban on plastic bags in chain grocery stores and drugstores in 2007. In a research paper for the Wharton School Institute for Law and Economics, law professors Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright crunched state and federal data on emergency room admissions and food-borne-illness deaths and figured that the San Francisco ban "led to an increase in infections immediately upon implementation."
They found a 46 percent rise in food-borne-illness deaths. The bottom line: "Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths."

I am sure that the study will be sliced and diced.  But, hey, as far as I am concerned, it was a wonderful reminder for me to wash those two bags.  

When San Francisco introduced the ban, it was reported that:

Fifty years ago, plastic bags -- starting first with the sandwich bag -- were seen in the United States as a more sanitary and environmentally friendly alternative to the deforesting paper bag. Now an estimated 180 million plastic bags are distributed to shoppers each year in San Francisco. Made of filmy plastic, they are hard to recycle and easily blow into trees and waterways, where they are blamed for killing marine life. They also occupy much-needed landfill space.

That is right; they were introduced as a more sanitary alternative!  

It certainly is a horrible sight when plastic bags lie scattered by the roadside and when they become an environmental problem after their use.  My neighbor joked after his trip to Mali--this was way before the current turmoil there--that it seemed like Mali's national flower was the plastic bag!  

I switched to the reusable bags only because of my own worries over the environmental aspects.  I even authored an opinion piece a few years ago about this very issue.  The news report does not mean that I will ditch my reusable bags; I know better now, and will regularly wash them.  But, this is yet another story about unintended consequences of our actions, however noble our goals might be.

Anyway, back when the ban was introduced in San Francisco, the business community protested:

The grocers association has warned that the new law will lead to higher prices for San Francisco shoppers.
"We're disappointed that the Board of Supervisors is going down this path," said Kristin Power, the association's vice president for government relations.

So, now the grocers association will be excited, right?

Wrong, again!

Dave Heylen of the California Grocers Association ripped the study for not understanding something really basic about how the San Francisco bag ban worked at first. "People weren't using reusable bags, they were using paper bags," Heylen said.
Be it noted, the grocers have supported proposals for a statewide ban on plastic bags - which would require supermarkets to charge for single-use bags - because they provide what the sponsor of Sacramento's latest effort, Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, calls "uniformity of experience" for shoppers and store owners. (It also means big stores can charge for bags and blame the government.)

Haha!

Anyway, if using reusable bags, and avoiding plastic bags, is from an environmental perspective, then, shouldn't we factor into the calculation the environmental costs of manufacturing the reusable bags and of washing them?  Gets complicated, eh!

As I tell students, in so many ways and over and over, rarely is anything what we think it is, and our gut reactions are almost always incorrect, which is why we need to critically think through the issues.  Will add this plastic bag issue to my collections!

And will maniacally wash my reusable bags, of course!

Making a difference clearly lies in the bag

For The Register-Guard
Published: August 4, 2008 12:00AM

Recently, I have pre-empted the “paper or plastic” question at our neighborhood Market of Choice grocery because of the reusable shopping bag I bring with me.

I suppose I am resuming this practice after suspending it for quite a few years. When I was growing up in India, buying groceries and produce meant that we walked to the nearby shop. We had a bag or two at home that were referred to as the “grocery bag” — not too big, not too small, just the right size to carry vegetables and groceries. Vegetables and fruits would get mixed up because there were no plastic bags to keep them separate, and we would sort them out at home.

After coming to the United States, I saved the bags given away as mementos at conferences and took them to India, because my parents thought they were just the right size for their shopping.

India was very different then. It had not become the outsourcing and tech-support capital of the world. In a way, the shopping bag captures that change. Beginning in the early 1990s, as India eased government restrictions on economic activities, the seemingly pedestrian activity of taking a bag from home to the store changed almost instantaneously.

I noticed during my visits to India that even the mango seller on the sidewalk had thin plastic bags for his wonderfully juicy mangoes. The vegetable lady bagged potatoes separately from the tomatoes, and these small bags were then dropped into larger plastic bags.

And on more recent trips I was blown away by the American-style grocery stores, where I could walk down the aisles and pick up what I wanted. And yes, at the checkout counter all these purchases are dropped into convenient plastic bags. No more designated “grocery bags” at homes.

On the other side of the world, here in the United States, we are slowly beginning to understand that our way of life, which includes bags and bags of stuff, might not be compatible with a sustainable planet. The plastic bag itself is more than an environmental nuisance. In a way that is more than symbolic, the use of plastic bags represents the global environmental challenge.

For many decades, we in the United States provided the yardsticks for measuring what it meant to be a developed and rich country. Going to mega-stores where there are umpteen varieties of everything, carting off the purchased goods in the trunk of a car, and then coming home and unloading the plastic shopping bags are scenes we all know too well. It is no surprise that people in India, too, want to enjoy the material life that we have considered as an inalienable right in the pursuit of happiness.

It is easy to forget that it has barely been a generation since India’s economy took off. Yet there is enormous pressure — externally, in particular — to change course and care for the environment.

It’s no wonder, then, that even the chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, R.K. Pachauri, has asked developed countries to “get off the backs of India and China.” He went on to say that the rich countries should assist countries such as India move to a path of sustainable development that will have lesser impacts on the environment.

Yet even many people in India beat me in getting (back) into taking reusable grocery bags to the store. A few states in India actively are discouraging the use of plastic shopping bags. The city of Mumbai attempted a complete ban on these bags, but it apparently failed because of pressure from the plastics industry.

While many in India protest being unfairly blamed for the global environmental crisis, their constructive responses, given their level of economic development, is impressive.

Well, I am returning to my old ways of taking my own reusable bag to the grocery store. Of course, the carbon footprint from my next trip to India will wipe out the small gains that result from taking my geographers’ conference bag to the store.

But, hey, one guilt trip at a time, please!

Copyright © 2008 — The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA