Remember when plastic grocery bags started appearing? Remember why? "We need to save the trees....all those paper bags are destroying our forests. Plastic is much better." So said all the hippy tree huggers with an axe to grind (okay maybe not the best analogy to use but hey...). Now these same self-serving, holier than thou, tree hugging hippies (who were the cause of plastic bags being used for groceries) are now saying that "Plastic bags are evil. You should buy your own bags and bring them to the grocery store...." Excuse me? Let's see....to wash a bunch of cloth bags would require 1 extra load of laundry plus longer drying time (that heavy canvas doesn't dry real quick)...therefore using that much more water and adding that much more detergent to the water ways plus using more electricity. Yeah...saving the environment...sure we are! Pardon me EcoNazis, but if we were to all buy canvas reusable bags and bring those to our grocery store, would they charge us less? I've heard of a few giving you a break, but it's usually specialty grocery chains that are already more expensive than you Safeway/Kroger mega stores so they can appear to be "eco-friendly" while still making a killing (thus the nickname Whole Foods has; Whole Paycheck). Don't get me wrong, these are great stores if you want quality meats and breads and such, but for everyday grocery shopping they are soooo expensive. If Kroger and Safeway, etc were to require you to bring in your own bags, they'd still find a way to charge you for it. Plastic bags cost .02 cents a piece.....they spread this cost through the store with their markups. Reusable bags cost .99 a piece....okay let me get this straight; we usually buy 100 bucks worth of groceries when we go shopping for the 3 of us. That's about 10 bags of groceries say 12. The price of the plastic bags they are bagged in is included in the 100 bucks.....the extra 12 dollars in reusable bags is added on to the 100 of the groceries. I guess these EcoNazis want us to use more of the kitchen sized garbage bags for our small garbage and cat litter, etc when we do our weekly garbage night. Trust me folks, plastic garbage bags do not go to waste in our house. I use them for transporting lunch to work, we line the bathroom garbage cans (small wastebaskets) with them, scoop the cat crap and pee clumps into them. Lots of uses......saving this planet is going to kill us financially in the long run. Think about it folks. If the stores want us to use these reusable bags, then bag our damn groceries in them. Make grocery carts with a hook on the side so you can hang the bags off of them....imagine having to carry a dozen canvas bags into a store, then carrying them around with you while shopping. Some people may even put their items in the bags while they shop. You think it takes a long time at the checkout stand now......just wait until a cashier has to unload each bag then hand off the bag to the bagger to rebag the items in. Or better yet, if you are nice enough to unbag them for the cashier, just think how long that will take? What's wrong with us folks? By getting rid of plastic grocery bags, you aren't doing a damn thing to save the environment. You still use plastic garbage bags at home.....and if you don't, the garbage companies most likely tell you your garbage has to be bagged before being put in their collection bins. This whole idea of me providing my own bags when shopping is ridiculous. What's next? You have to package your own food too? Or when you go to the Department Store will you have to bring a canvas bag as well? Wouldn't that be great, the bag I bring home raw meat in is the same bag I will put a nice shirt I bought from Belk's in. MMMMMM nice. C'mon.....can't we see how silly this is? Yes, reuse the damn things folks, don't just throw them away. Plastic grocery bags are a small percentage of the landfills, lawn and kitchen sized plastic bags probably take up more landfill space than any others. People use them more often.
Edit: BTW, before I start getting comments from "angry hippies"...I should say that I think recycling is a good thing. It makes sense from a capitalistic standpoint. You save money by constantly reusing packaging instead of having to pay to dispose of it. Less landfills, more residential and retail developments for me to go be a happy little consumer at. Hee hee...... it also uses less resources...instead of creating plastic from scratch...we are taking old, sterilized and cleaned plastic and turning it into new plastic......why these grocery stores don't collect used bags is beyond me. Only Safeway does, that I know of. I'm sure these bags can be recycled....and if curbside recycling took them, we would't have to worry about them.
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