28 December 2017

Brown Paper Bags

Until fairly recently you could buy groceries in plastic bags (lettuce, beans, bulk items etc.).

Now, instead of plastic bags stores offer paper bags.

I look around the kitchen and see piles of paper bags everywhere.

There are several problems with paper bags:

• you can’t see what’s in the paper bags, so you end up throwing away vegetables that didn’t get eaten.
• most of the uses of recycled plastic bags don’t work with paper bags: stinky fish leftovers, cat litter, keeping a sandwich fresh in my backpack, organizing screws etc.
• they take up much more room and cannot be stored an a random compressed fashion
• they are ruined if they get wet, a problem if you want to keep lettuce in them
• lettuce doesn’t fit well into the paper bags that are available for it. Perhaps there are conical lettuce-shaped paper bags out there but I have not seen them.
• they are more easily torn
• they cost n times more to produce than a plastic bag

The part of the situation that is interesting to me is how people who are “ecologically aware” are completely blind to this waste of resources.

They are surrounded by mountains of crumpled paper bags that will never get reused, yet remain convinced that these bags are better for the environment.

I am sure that in many contexts the elimination of plastic bags is a good thing.

Convenience stores selling sandwiches and pop should not, for example, furnish a plastic bag with the sandwich.

But for actual grocery shopping, plastic is better than paper both for users and for the environment.