Too Much of Some Things

What do we all have too much of, rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban, whatever continent (except Antarctica) that we’re on?

Well, there’s war and sickness and slugs, and stuff like that, but in the realm of positive items, one thing we have too much of is plastic bags. It’s because they’re so useful, so cheap, so small-space occupying (at least in the house itself). This is one of those things that you might think that small places would have moved to get rid of just because a relatively small effort ought to get quick results. In Point Roberts, e.g., there’s only one or two places that actually give you a plastic bag. There could be none. Roberts Creek, much more of a problem because there are so many more stores, but still nothing like Vancouver or San Francisco (and San Francisco actually has banned them). And yet, and yet: The International Marketplace, the primary source of plastic bags in Point Roberts offers only to take your plastic bags back for recycling. Even the recycling program, such as it is on the Point, does not accept plastic bag recycling.

Why is that? Entire countries have banned plastic bags (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, according to the Daily Globe and Mail). Cities and towns all over the world have done it, but not Point Roberts, not Roberts Creek. The grocery stores in both places offer, as I recall, a three cent credit for each plastic bag you don’t use. Ireland, by contrast, charges you 23 cents for each plastic bag you do use. And at that price, the Irish have very quickly figured out some other way to carry their groceries.

Food prices are up, inflation is up: this may be the time to encourage the use of fewer plastic bags, either by charging more for them or offering a larger credit for using them, or just by people choosing to use cloth bags instead because we’ve all got way too many plastic bags around already. I’ve been using cloth bags for over 20 years—ever since my daughter, then working in a co-op grocery store, bought two or three wonderfully sturdy, black linen shopping bags for me. I’m still using them, along with a half dozen less wonderful ones that I’ve acquired here and there. They live in the car and, because I have so many of them, there are always a few available to me when I find myself shopping. Recently, I have had shoppers behind me in line congratulate me for bringing my own bag, so it appears that it is beginning to sink into our psyches that we don’t need anywhere near as many plastic bags as we have. These shoppers, alas, always say, ‘I forgot to bring mine.’ Time to start remembering, I’d say.

Plastic bags last forever, in landfills. Ocean-going animals have great trouble with them. They’re made from oil and we don’t really need to use that extra amount of oil, surely. Nobody who lives near the ocean is unaware of the ugly, trashy look that washed-up plastic bags give to the beach, and any walker knows what they look like, water-soaked, along the roadside. But maybe the killer argument is that we already have more of them than we need. We wouldn’t have to be giving something up; we’d be not having something we don’t even want.

(Addendum: The New York Times Magazine (June 22) has a terrific article on plastic trash drifting around the oceans, and what it took to clean up one beach in Alaska: go here.