Americans and plastic bag use

To me, one of the most annoying and seemingly simple environmental problems is the use of plastic bags. When you go to just about any kind of store to purchase anything, whether it be groceries, hardware, clothes, or electronics, you leave the store with at least one plastic bag. While plastic bags are very inexpensive to produce and durable enough to hold a great deal of weight, they contribute a great deal of waste to our landfills. Just think about how many stores operate in a local shopping district, about the hours they are open, and the amount of traffic each store receives. The amount of plastic bags used and discarded each day is astronomical. There are plenty of times where I have been to a store and bought one item, and they put it in a bag unless I specifically ask them not to. I have also noticed in some of the southern states that in Walmart they will actually use a separate bag for each item! According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 380 billion plastic bags are used in the US each year, about 100 billion being plastic shopping bags.

I would like to see more big companies do away with plastic bags in their checkouts. There is no reason why we need to use a new bag every time we go to the store when there are plenty bags around that could be re-used. I think that the store Aldi sets a good example when it comes to plastic bags. If you shop at Aldi, than you already know that bags will not be provided for you, nor will your cart. Shoppers either bring their own reusable bags, or use empty boxes at the store to box up their purchases. If they forget to bring bags, they can purchase paper bags at the checkout for 10 cents apiece. I would like to see more stores switch over to this type of system. It would save money for the store, and it would use fewer resources and reduce a tremendous amount of waste. If regulations like these were implemented, the consumers would have to start remembering to bring their own bags, or else they will have to face the 10 cent per bag fee.

Some stores have started programs to recycle their plastic bags, which is a step in the right direction, but I don’t think it’s good enough. A very small percentage of bags actually make it back to the recycling bins. Some other stores have been promoting “green” shopping by selling their own reusable shopping bags, or by giving a small discount to those using reusable bags. While this seems to be another step in the right direction, our goals could be set much higher for reducing plastic bag waste. What needs to be done is to completely stop using them. Some would say that this is an unrealistic goal, but think about what would happen if one company alone, a huge company such as Walmart completely stopped using plastic bags. People would be forced to bring their own bags to the store. I think that we should have to pay a little bit to use bags so people will realize that they don’t need to keep paying for bags, they can just bring their own. If we switched to a system where everyone had to pay 5 cents per bag, a lot less people would use them. Keeping a reusable shopping bag in your vehicle is not very hard, and if you forgot your bags at home, the penalty would not be very high.