A month ago, I mentioned that our car was broken into and a number of canvas shopping bags were stolen [1]. The reason we have them is the same reason people buy canvas shopping bags: we’re more and more tired of only having the choice of paper or plastic. Neither are good choices – you use them one and throw them out. It’s a terrible waste. If you go shopping once a week and use, say 5 plastic bags for your groceries, that adds up to 260 bags a year. The Wikipedia notes that plastic bags [2] are made from various forms of petroleum by-products, such as polyethylene or polypropelene. It take 430,000 gallons of oil to make 100 million bags [3], which means you would expend 1 gallon of oil per year for your bags. Now, if 260 million Americans do that, that’s 260 million gallons of oil required per year to feed the bag usage in this country.
Jodi started using cloth and canvas bags a few years ago. Since each store charges a small fee, per plastic bag, for their use, we get a “bag refund” for each cloth bag they fill with groceries. That’s about $0.05 per bag. It’s small, but it’s a little reward for good stewardship and some social and environmental consciousness. It’s good to reward people for doing the right thing and punish people for doing the wrong thing. Clearly, choking landfills (and roadsides) with plastic shopping bags is a bad thing, while saving a gallon of oil per year and avoiding waste is a good thing.
Sadly, many stores then use a form of social punishment to take the reward away. Every store we shop at, at the moment when they compute the bag refund, then ask, “Would you like to donate your refund to the [insert local educational or child charity here]?” At first, we were meek. We’d look bad, in front of the cashier and the other people in line, to say “No.” It’s social engineering – get the money back from the people, who earned it while doing good, by asking them to put it right into a local charity. The people who use plastic bags don’t get asked to donate $0.05 per bag on top of the cost of their groceries. Instead, they single out the people who do some good for a donation. It’s not only financially unfair – we’re saving money in the long run by reusing our bags and saving oil for the globe – it’s hypocritical. The do-baddies get to spend their gallon of oil, choke the environment with waste, and not contribute to local charity while the do-gooders get asked to make one more sacrifice.
It’s a symptom of a larger problem in this country. Those with resources get to keep more of them, while those with less get more taken away. Those with the desire to invest in new energy technology have to do it largely out of their own pockets, while big oil and big gas get government subsidies that lower the overall cost of their product. Asking the grass roots efforts, like resuable bags, to pay extra into charity while leaving the others free to hold onto their cash without penalty is just one more way our society sends all the wrong messages to its citizens.
[1] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/blog/?p=418
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_shopping_bag
[3] http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/28/MNGDROT5QN1.DTL
