My life without plastic bags
by Michelle Desveaux
It’s been years since I began refusing single use plastic bags when shopping for groceries, and quite a while since I’ve been bringing my cloth bags wherever I shop, whether it be for clothing or hardware. It took a bit of time for me to remember to always bring my bags, but now it’s second nature: grab my keys, grab my bags….
Consequently, you would be hard pressed to find a plastic carry-out bag in our house. There may be one lingering in some dark corner, but I really couldn’t tell you where, and yet somehow life goes on quite comfortably without them!
First of all, it’s so refreshing not having to dedicate a drawer or other spot to smash all those plastic bags into for possible future use and then, with much environmental guilt, throw half of them away because they’re piling up faster than I can find uses for them! Sure, I recycle them, but the truth is, only a very tiny fraction (5%) ever make it to the recycling plant, and besides, recycling means using more fossil fuels to transport them and to make them into a final product that is almost always (99.9% of the time) not further recyclable. So, the bags that we do recycle never biodegrade no matter what form they take, and they will remain for our children’s children and beyond! We are simply making way for more trash and continue to squander our precious resources on an unnecessary item that we often use for as little as 10 minutes!
Life at our house is quite simple and comfortable. We use only one 13 gallon plastic kitchen bag for trash most weeks. All other trash bins (bathrooms, bedrooms, etc.) go bag-less and are emptied into our kitchen bag once a week or as needed. Once in a while, we may feel the need to wash the bathroom trash bins, but not very often.
Also, because we have a sweet, old, black lab, we have a poop situation! We purchase small, corn based compostable bags, which I don’t feel great about, but at least we are using far less “plastic” per poop! If you’re dead against purchasing bags for such purposes, there are tons of options that come into your home daily: bread and bun bags, cold cut bags, newspaper bags, veggie bags, cereal bags, snack bags, the bags that rubber gloves come in and all the other gazillion bags that enter your world! If you have friends that don’t have a dog, ask them to keep their bread bags for you. They are also the perfect size for packing shoes for travel, storing veggies in the fridge, carrying or disposing of something messy and more. Lastly, when I have the need to transport something to a friend (“just leave it in a bag on the porch”), I use the nice sturdy-handled paper bags that I get from gift shops and such. I do accept a nice paper bag from shops now and then…!
In all the years that I’ve been using cloth bags for my groceries, including meat purchases, I have not once taken ill from this habit (we do wash them when needed). I do, however, have a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that I am doing my part to eliminate waste and pollution for this generation and beyond.
