Bag the Bag

Here’s the Thing:

Take 1 less plastic bag next time you leave the supermarket.

No laptops were harmed in the posting of this blog.

The pile of plastic bags under my kitchen sink is getting out of hand. No, it’s been out of hand for a while — in fact about a year ago I started a second pile in a shopping bag under the microwave. I now have a paper bag of plastic bags supplementing a plastic container of plastic bags, each of which had an active useful life span of about six minutes — the time it takes me to walk from the Key Food to my apartment.

I try to reuse the bags as often as possible, but honestly, what am I going to do with six hundred plastic shopping bags, most of which have small holes in them? It’s a war I’m never ever going to win. And I’d bet a lot of us are fighting the same war and we’re all losing.

Imagine the sheer number of bags flowing into and out of New York City every day, most of which will only see a couple blocks worth of daylight in their lifetime. I can’t even begin to guess at the amount of wasted natural and human resources — making the bags, shipping the bags, carting the bags away in the trash. And the amount of bags that sit in landfills around this country? (There are over 3,000 active landfills and 10,000 old municipal landfills across the United States, all of which will eventually leak into ground and surface water, according to zerowasteamerica.org.)

And if your local supermarket checker is anything like mine (and I bet he is), he’s a bit bag happy. Okay, I get that my eggs need to go in a separate bag so they don’t get jostled by the big bad Tropicana man. But do they really need to be double bagged? Does that 8 oz cereal box need two bags? How about the package of sponges and toilet paper? Especially if I’m just walking a few blocks — or even better — out to my car and then in from my car. Seriously, lose the second bag every once in a while. Maybe pile a few more things in the same bag. Or, if you’re really bad ass, get a big stinking canvas bag to carry home all your oversized jars of marmalade.

This is New York. Imagine if each one of the 8 million of us asked for one less bag this week. Every week. That’s nearly half a billion fewer bags to end up in landfills this year. And that’s just New York City and just one less bag per week. It seems to me there’s a lot of potential here.