FRISCO IS RIGHT ABOUT PLASTIC BAGS
It pains me to say this.
But San Francisco might be right.
It's time for plastic grocery bags to go.
They don't work, they waste oil, they are a huge litter problem and they clog landfills.
It might sound like I've turned into an environmentalist, but the fact is that plastic bags are trash. They've been a bad idea since the start and they only reason we have them is because stores are too cheap to stock paper bags.
Here's the background.
A long time ago, when people lived in caves and obesity was rare, if you bought something at a store they put it in a paper bag. The leader in this field was the grocery bag. It was brown paper, neatly rectangular, sturdy and strong.
When you bought groceries, some 15-year-old making $2 an hour loaded them neatly into one of these paper grocery bags. Back in those days, they actually loaded the groceries in a way that made sense. They put the bread on top, for example, and the cans on the bottom.
Those were the days.
Groceries were easy to carry. Unloading your car was a lot easier, and with a little smoothing and folding, the bags were reusable at home.
Then somebody realized paper was made out of trees.
So they complained and demonstrated and wrote letters to the editor. Paper bags were bad, they claimed, because they contributed to deforestation. Apparently unaware that trees grow back, the environmentalist people came up with a better idea.
That's right, bags made out of crude oil.
Drill deep wells into the ground, pump out the oil at great expense, put it on supertankers to circumnavigate the globe, process it into plastic, make it into bags, put WalMart stuff into the bags, and then throw them away.
Because we don't have enough wasted oil in landfills already.
When the new bags were introduced, the magic phrase “paper or plastic?” was first heard. At first it was novel and exciting and people asked for plastic because they wanted to be cool.
Unfortunately, the bags were crap.
Just like today.
They're spineless, wimpy, structureless sacks that turn your merchandise into an indistinguishable pile in the backseat. They don't hold your stuff very well, they're a pain to carry, they are too small, and once you've emptied them they are a useless annoyance.
Plus, they now dot the American landscape. It's hard to find anywhere where these obnoxious discarded bags haven't infiltrated the countryside. It's like litter on crack.
And they are a waste. I mean, God only made so much oil. Let's put as much of it as we can into our gas tanks, instead of turning it into WalMart bags.
Speaking of which. The little rotary system WalMart uses to bag merchandise is as annoying as life gets.
But what about San Francisco?
The San Francisco City Council, one of the larger bunch of lunatics running loose in the country, has said that plastic bags have to go. Starting soon, grocers and pharmacies – do they even have WalMart in San Francisco? -- must provide biodegradable corn-oil bags, a cloth sack or a recyclable paper bag.
Regular old plastic bags, the king of litter, will not be an option.
And that, believe it or not, is a good idea.
Sure, it will cost the stores some small amount of additional money, but they're not shy about raising their prices to cover expenses, so that won't be a problem. Stores complain that they don't know if paper bags will work. They shouldn't worry. I'm old enough to remember when people used paper bags everyday, and somehow the people survived and the stores made a profit.
So that's the point. Plastic shopping bags are an idea whose time has passed. The paper shopping bag is an idea whose time has returned.
And believe it or not, San Francisco got it right.
Which just proves the point: Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2007
