Bring Your Own Bags To The Grocery Store

It is time for BYOB! Yes, bring your own shopping bag! While we continue our path throughout a eventful 2010, it’s crazy to think about how much shopping we traditionally do now in America and world-wide. Whether it be frequent visits into the supermarket as we keep our kitchen’s stocked for superb meals and tasty goodies or those sometimes dreaded (yet skillful) "6 bags on each arm" walks through the neighborhood shopping mall, it all adds up to a great deal of needless garbage. Probably the most blatant examples of this waste is disposable grocery bags.

An estimated 100 billion plastic shopping bags are consumed each year in the USA, according to the Wall-Street Journal. Most plastic bags wind up in landfills furthermore the rest often end up in rivers, ponds, lakes, streams or in the ocean, where animals can ingest or become entangled in them. Bearing in mind the amount of shopping bags that are consumed and wasted each year, the time is now to spread the word about the constructive benefits of eco-friendly reusable grocery bags. After all, most of us desire to give back to our families, friends and communities as often as possible.

Adopting a BYOB strategy in our individual shopping habits is a simple method to do exactly that. If we could boost consciousness at this time, the positive outcome for our environment is immense for 2010 and well into the future. Numerous cities have already made gradual but momentous progress in promoting the usage of eco friendly bags in recent years. Motivating consumers with plastic and paper bag bans, savings at the register for reusable bag usage and tax motivations are a few to speak of.

Right here in America, the San Jose City Council only just approved one of the nation’s strictest bans on plastic and paper shopping bags. It is a big victory for the Bay Area, that has 1 million plastic bags per year accumulating in and along the San Francisco Bay. San Jose becomes the latest bay area town to endorse some sort of ban on disposable shopping bags; some others comprise of San Francisco and Palo Alto. Tracy Seipel of the San Jose Mercury News reported that it was in fact ONE man who truly jump-started the ban, another impressive instance of the influence of one person. Here’s a an excerpt:

"While visiting his sister-in-law in Taipei, (Kansen) Chu (elected to San Jose city council in 2007) went grocery shopping and was surprised to get charged for plastic grocery bags. The next day, he brought his own cloth bags back to the store. "I guess the question," said Chu, "was, ‘Why not San Jose?’ " He began a conversation with the city’s environmental services staff, which later moved to council committee discussions.

Save the Bay’s 4th annual report on the most garbage-strewn places in the region further demonstrates the need for BYOB. The 50-year-old environmental advocacy group focused on 10 explicit bay-area sites where approximately 15,000 plastic bags were recovered in one day last year in their account. Here’s an excerpt of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kelly Zito.

According to (Save the Bay’s) research, Californians use about 19 billion plastic bags each year, 3.8 million in the Bay Area. The average use time for the bags - made using about 12 million barrels of oil each year in the United States - is about 12 minutes. In addition to the hundreds of years it can take for a plastic bag to decompose in a landfill, the bags also force downtime when fed into traditional recycling equipment. Typically, the bags get wound into conveyor belts or gears and must be cut out by hand.

Ten US metropolitan areas have banned plastic bags to date, five within the past year. Even Mexico City enacted a ban on plastic shopping bags, which went into effect in August. The city of 20 million now faces the realities of effective enforcement, which isn't easy while the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce estimates there are 35,000 vendors in Mexico City’s downtown vicinity alone.

Bans on plastic bags aren’t the only helpful approach to cut back detrimental waste brought on by disposable bags. PlasTaxes, which tax consumers at the register for using plastic bags when shopping, had been first introduced by the Irish. John Roach of National Geographic reported in 2008 about the worldwide momentum that’s been building since Ireland instituted a PlasTax in 2003. The Irish confirmed they could reduce plastic bag utilization by 90% or more. Momentum is rising internationally, predominantly in America. From Washington, DC to Edmonds, WA to North Pole, AK, communities and governments are creating an international trend to reduce the harmful environmental effects of disposable shopping bags. In the great state of Hawaii, the legislature is currently considering a bill to ban single-use plastic bags (SUP), or to establish a minimal charge make use of SUP bags.

Even key retail stores like Target and CVS are taking action by enacting savings at the register for customers who choose to BYOB or just carry-out their stuff without a bag. For those naysayers, it’s convenient to discount recent momentum in reducing disposable bag waste. But to several, the wide-spread adoption of eco-friendly recycled bags is inevitable. Examine the way smoking is becoming taboo in America. Indoor smoking bans have caught on like wild-fire. In the same way, who is to say the usage of disposable bags won’t turn out to be taboo at some point in the (hopefully near) future? The use of eco-friendly recycled grocery bags is unquestionably picking up steam. Our personal decisions to take our recycled shopping bags can go much farther than we think. That’s what BYOB is all about.

Of course, plastic and paper bags should be recycled and it’s crucial to keep in mind a bunch of large retailers including Albertsons and Wal-Mart will recycle plastic bags for you (just have to bring them your accumulated stash). That being said, a BYOB shopping strategy can make your life so much less difficult because there isn't a need to accumulate that cupboard full of plastic bags or determine what and when to deal with it. Keeping a couple of eco bags inside your car or backpack is a great way to ensure you possess them when required. Thus give back this year by remembering to BYOB! No matter whether it be in a convenience store, the shopping mall, or while grocery shopping, we could make a change for our environment and help raise knowledge one transaction at a time. In the fight to eliminate disposable shopping bag waste, 2010 is our moment.

Article Source: http://www.gamblingarticlessite.net

Albert Jefferson is a well experienced writer debating eco and recycling topics furthermore extending the ideal to corporations to make use of eco friendly trade show bags in promoting both their brand and consciousness for this planet.

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