It's in the Bag!

It's another past memory, shopping for groceries with my mother, who had brought her own canvas shopping bag, a common practice back in the day. The clerk told her that she was no longer permitted to put the groceries into the bag from home as it was unsanitary to do so. My mother argued, but the check-out personnel ran the grocery store. Once adjusted to paper bags that were reused and recycled a thousand ways in our home, one day my mother's groceries were packed into plastic bags. She strenuously objected, but again lost the argument, this time in favor of the trees that were cut down to provide the paper to make the (recyclable) paper grocery bags.

It did not matter that an entire industry was devoted to growing the trees, harvesting the wood for use in a thousand different businesses: we were no longer going to cut down trees to make paper grocery bags. Our family had a challenging time finding other things to use for all the ways we recycled paper bags, including textbook covers, cookie sheets, adjusting sewing patterns to fit 2 different sized children, wastebasket liners, gathering the table scraps to feed the animals, containing the dog poop until trash pick-up, bagging up the daily newspaper for recycling, and on and on and on.

Our life without paper bags was drastically changed, and our life with plastic bags slowly evolved into figuring out what the heck to do with the plastic bags once we no longer needed them to carry groceries from the store to the car, from the car to our home. More often than not, after filling an empty plastic bag with more empty plastic bags, we took them back to the store and donated them to the reuse bin, but I never once saw anyone take a bag out of the reuse plastic bag bin! My thinking: I didn't know where those plastic bags had been or what might be hiding within, so no way was I going to take a bag out of the reuse bin.

Today, an article appeared in the local paper advising all consumers that the State of CA is legislatively shutting down the use of both plastic and paper bags. ALL citizens must provide their own shopping bags -- or purchase approved "green" products at the check-out counter. It there's a dime or a dollar to be made, enterprising entrepreneurs figure out how to put it into their own pockets.

CA politicians won't raise taxes because they won't be re-elected, but it won't be long before a "bag fee" automatically appears on every purchase in the state, in part to pay for bags for those consumers who cannot afford to pay for them out of their own pocket. There will be no use arguing against the fee because there's always a logical reason to pay the bag fee, even though you bring your bag to the store, such as the sanitation argument used back in the day. Someone has to pay the salary of the person who checks your bag to ensure that you don't bring something into the store that should not be there, nor walk out with something that does not belong in your bag, and it isn't going to come out of the business's till.

Yes, plastic is today's urban tumbleweed, but what about all the other uses of plastics? Are all the thousands of products regularly manufactured from plastic going to be discontinued or replaced with green products or heavily taxed for the failure to do so? Plastic in the desert lasts about one full year before it is weathered beyond safe use. It splinters and breaks, leaving sharp shards that injure both the children whose playthings are made from it and the adults who have to pick up the pieces. It is not cost effective for the consumer as anything made from plastic has to be purchased again and again and again, but for the manufacturer, it has been a godsend. Little red wagons went from generational metal family equipment to plastic junk in the landfill. Wooden pull and push toys today are expensive collectibles, while the plastic toys from the big box store seldom last more than a month before they, too, are in the landfill. The Hot Wheels of my son's generation are still being used by the g'children, while the molded plastic cars sold today cannot be removed from the plastic packaging with the wheels still attached.

The legislature ensuring that all shopping bags will now be either fabric or "green" products, such as paper bags made from recycled materials, is a much bigger step than just retraining consumers to be responsible for bringing their own shopping bags to retail establishments. Once the politicians have their foot through the bad plastic doorway, the days of common plastic manufacturing are limited.

Remember the sales philosophy of planned obsolescene? Manufacturers retooled to make products from plastic as goods made from metals simply outlasted the first generation of use and were not cost effective because they were made to last, not to toss in the trash. We all accepted that philosophy because we needed our jobs, and that's where we're headed again. Plastic is beginning to fade from the forefront of our lives as more Americans are rethinking "made to last." Are the plastics manufacturing plants going to retool and again make products that last? Where are the workers employed in the plastic bag industry going to go to work? The metal factories have been shut down and dark for decades, so who has the first-hand knowledge to reopen those doors and restart the manufacturing processes necessary to replace plastic?

Not everything we did in the past should be laughed off and done differently in the present, nor should we discard everything done in the present to return to the past. And, most importantly, who is going to stand at the entrance to the businesses to enforce the sure-to-come legislation that guarantees the fabric bags and/or the green bags made from recycled products are sanitary?? Maybe someone can come up with a misting system to be installed at all doorways next to the shop lifting alarms, through which both consumer and bags will pass -- and be sanitized!

Hey, this could be a great idea ... and a start for new business opportunities.