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greening it your guide to greener living
College students should start a new BYOB: Bring Your Own Bag.
At the grocery store, when asked if you want paper or plastic, your answer should be neither.
Plastic bags are made from polyethylene, which, like all plastics, is derived from oil. According to www.worldwatch.org, fewer than 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled, leaving the other 100 billion to clog streams and take up space in landfills.
It takes 11 barrels of oil to make a ton of plastic bags. Our reliance on this seemingly innocent staple of American life could be continuing our country's dependence on oil from the Middle East.
Because of the plastic bags' detrimental effects on the environment, San Francisco banned them last year. It is the first city in the United States to do so, but other large cities like Boston and Chicago are considering similar proposals.
Even though nothing that green is growing in the
Plastic bags: by the numbers
- Plastic bags take 1,000 years to disintegrate in landfills
- Less than 1 percent of bags are recycled
- Widespread use in supermarkets started in 1980
84 billion bags are used every year in the United States
Sources: GOOD magazine, www.reusablebags.com
Midwest, consumers can still curb the amount of waste generated by their everyday shopping habits.
Some stores in the Lawrence area offer a discount for customers who bring in their own bags. Both The Merc, 901 Iowa St, and all Dillons stores offer a five cent discount for every reused bag.
"We do this for grocery bags, produce bags and coffee bags," says Janie Wells, general manager of The Merc. "I started in 1996, and we've been offering the discount at least since then."
Sheila Rowrie, Dillons spokesperson, says that Dillons has been offering the discount "for as long as any of us can remember;" and that she has been with the company for 11 years.
Even though five cents may not seem like much money, the spare
change adds up over time. The problem with offering this discount is that many customers have no idea that it even exists. Rowrie says that the discount is not explicitly advertised.
"It's more of a word-of-mouth thing," she says.
Wells says that The Merc has some instore signs about the discount and that it is occasionally mentioned in advertisements or newsletters.
For people who don't see the environmental benefits of using reusable bags, they need to be notified of the four Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle remember this phrase) and shown the monetary benefit they would gain.
Larger chain stores, such as Wal-Mart, do not offer a discount for bringing in your own bag, but assistant manager Robert Garner at the store at 3300 Iowa says that the store welcomes people who want to BYOB.
"You can bring your own bags in—that's fine," he says. "We probably don't offer a discount because we have a very big recycling program that the company uses for all stores, so that the bags are used as many times as possible."
Although reusable bags are omnipresent at all types of stores now, larger corporations are still dragging their feet on the issue.
"Customers can buy a reusable bag for $1 at the store, but we do not offer a
merchandise discount." Wal-
Mart spokesperson Bill
Wertz says."That may be
something we'll consider
in the future, but I wouldn't
want to speculate at this
point."
Bringing cloth bags to the grocery store is more common now than it was in the 1980s or 1990s, Janie Wells says. She estimates that 30 percent of The Merc's customers now bring their own bags.
Wells says that The Merc has resisted charging customers for using the store's bags, a trend that is becoming
increasingly popular on the West Coast
"It's the Midwest," she says. "That's pretty harsh. I would rather approach this through education and offering a reward for making a good choice."
Now that you've got the facts, don't be left holding the wrong bag.
To Wal-mart or not to Wal-mart
Environmentalists typically turn up their noses at anything Wal-Mart-related, but the company recently started to become more environmentally friendly.
At the Wal-Mart Live Better Sustainability Summit last October, www.greenbiz.com reported that Wal-Mart has developed several environmentally friendly initiatives, such as a goal to sell 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs, a five-year plan to reduce packaging,"personal sustainability programs" for its employees and a general goal of sustainability.
Even though Wal-Mart is making a good effort to jump on the green band-Prius, it should probably not be the top choice for people who are looking to live a more environmentally friendly lifestyle.
The eco-label might still be a little too much for the company to swallow, and CEO Lee Scott was quoted in the GreenBiz article as saying. "We have simply started this process. We lay no claims to being a green company."
Contact the writer:
keith@kansan.com
interesting fact: Paul McCartney got "Rigby" from the name of a store and "Eleanor" from actress Eleanor Bron. McCartney wasn't sure what this song was going to be about until he came up with the line, "Picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been." That's when he came up with the story an old, lonely woman. —beatlesnumber9.com/fact.html
02.14.2008
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