Use of Plastic Bags Targeted by Environmentalists

The question, "paper or plastic?", often heard at full-service grocery store checkout counters, is rapidly disappearing from public discourse. Even though many grocery stores still stock paper bags, you have to ask for them if you want your groceries sacked in a paper bag in about the same way you have to ask for a glass of water in a California restaurant.

Not long ago, we were told by the environmental movement that the use of paper bags in supermarkets caused us to chop down too many trees, thus depleting ourselves of a precious natural resource. That argument is still being advanced by environmentally conscious citizens who would like to see us move from the plastic bags we use now, to "organic fabric bags." Look for plastic bags to be demonized more and more.

According to sources cited from an Environmental Protection Agency study done in 2003, the world consumes between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags a year. Virtually every environmental group declaring plastic bags to be hazardous agrees with this figure. The country of Bangladesh has banned the use of plastic bags in that country outright. The nations of Israel and Canada are reported to be considering bans on plastic bags and may well have already moved toward that as of the time of this writing.

If the following statistics are accurate regarding the use of plastic bags, then the real problem with them may be a cost issue. Recycling, something near and dear to environmentalists, and one of their more logical suggestions, is said to be prohibitive costwise when dealing with plastic bags. A figure has been thrown around that it costs $4,000 to process and recycle a ton of plastic bags that are sold for only $32, according to San Francisco's Dept. of the Environment. Which may help to explain that in March of 2007, San Francisco banned plastic bags. Mexico City is now seeking to impose jail terms and hefty fines for those using plastic bags in its domain. In an article pubished recently through an MSN affiliate in Mexico City, the Federal District, as it is known, is going to impose mandatory jail terms of up to 38 days (described as "arresto inconmutable") and fines of a minimum of 1000 days' wages and a maximum of 20,000 days' wages.

So what are the alternatives to plastic bags? For the short term, you'll be asked to keep your plastic bags and simply re-use them yourself. But the coming solution to this plastic bag dilemma is the organic cloth bag. A cursory glance at a typical vender, ECOBAGS, already a trademarked name, shows that the real value of using cloth bags must be in their re-usability. ECOBAGS seems poised to cash in on the coming cloth bag trend, making the purchase of the cloth bags a little pricey for individual consumers at $2.00 a bag on average. They have a website, www.ecobags.com, that you can check out for yourself. They'll obviously cater to the larger customer who buys in quantity, but in attempting to get some idea of their prices, they require anyone just "looking," to log in as a bona fide business that can provide a company name and prove they are a licensed reseller. So wholesale pricing information isn't available to the general public, in order to determine how the costs of organic cloth bags stack up with those of plastic bags.

With regard to the waste of oil reserves, plastic bags are said to be made out of polyethylene, a thermoplastic derived from oil. Because China charges for plastic bags and doesn't give them out for free, it is said that they will save "37 million barrels of oil a year," according to a CNN source. While such statements like this about the Chinese saving so many million barrels of oil a year sound compelling, it assumes that consumers in China will be averse to using plastic bags because they have to pay for them. If China had banned the use of plastic bags like Bangladesh, perhaps the savings in oil could be more readily believed.

Thus, the transition to cloth bags from plastic ones has already begun. In many ways, the idea makes sense, especially if it can produce at least some significant savings of oil reserves. But who is really going to profit from this transition? Are environmental groups forcing the change from plastic bags to cloth so that they can pick up a percentage of the profits? ECOBAGS, for instance, proudly displays the logos of a number of environmental groups advocating the switch to cloth bags. They can't be supporting ECOBAGS for free. Either they benefit from the advertising through donations from environmentally conscious purchasers of the cloth bags, or ECOBAGS simply gives these environmental groups a percentage of the sales of cloth bags. If ECOBAGS is only giving out pricing information to those companies who meet ECOBAGS' criteria for a wholesale purchase, that gives them the right to give more favorable pricing to those companies who support environmentalist agenda and less favorable pricing to those who do not. Since everyone knows what the costs are with regard to the use of plastic bags, then why the big secret about the cloth bags which are supposedly going to help clean up the planet? The old adage, "always follow the money," still applies here to be sure of the true motive for switching to organic cloth bags. After all, when we were told that cutting down trees to make paper bags was a waste of resources and a devastation of the planet, didn't we know that plastic bags used all that oil to produce them? The construction of plastic bags has to be a simple matter of science and chemistry. It just seems wise to be cautious in jumping on the bandwagon of radical environmentalism that seeks to jail and fine people just for using plastic bags, when the real intent could be the enforced behavior of a gullible public convinced that plastic bags are a danger in order to drive up the profitability of cloth bags. The idea of using cloth bags does have its definite logic. But why not allow consumers the choice, if they can be confronted with the facts truthfully?