Reduce plastic waste :: PlasticLess.com

I’m usually an enthusiastic cheerleader about reusable shopping bags. Disposable plastic shopping bags are one of the most obvious targets for plastic reduction. I was given pause when I read a thoughtful article complaining about the fact that businesses are giving away tons of canvas bags as promotional items and that consumers have consumed more reusable bags than they should.

The author admitted to finding 23 reusable bags in his own home. They take 100s of times more energy to produce than the same number of ’single use’ plastic bags. Logic dictates that you have to use a bag hundreds of times before it’s supposed environmental benefit is realized. Do you have dozens of reusable bags in your closet?

Here is my advice for people who already have too many reusable shopping bags -

• Start saying thanks, but no thanks to free reusable shopping bags.
• Don’t feel too bad about your accumulated bags. Tell yourself that you were planning ahead for the next few decades.
• Come out of the closet with the bags that you have accumulated. If they are hanging on a hall tree or sitting in a basket by the door, you are more likely to use them.
• Pack food bank donations in a reusable grocery bag and donate the bag along with the food.
• If you have some particularly cute bags that are in like new condition, use them in place of gift wrap when you have occasion to. The popular tradition of regifting might help move surplus reusable shopping bags into the hands of people who actually need them.
• If you drive, pack several bags up as small as you can and put them in your glove compartment. These are your emergency stash for when you forget to bring your everyday bags.
• Consider using your cloth shopping bags to carry items during activities instead of buying purpose specific tote bags.

Here is my advice to people who don’t have too many reusable shopping bags. -

• Check to see if you have any single use plastic bags packed away. They are actually reusable to some degree. I save the ones that appear in my house for dirty jobs like potatoes. I will use the plastic bag to buy bulk potatoes a few times and them use it as a garbage bag.
• If you need to get a few more bags, try to find bags that are made from repurposed material. Buy locally made when possible. Free is also good, but know when to say when.
• Consider making your own bags from available materials.
• Reusable shopping bags are typically larger and stronger than plastic shopping bags. Don’t think that you need 10 cloth shopping bags because you used to buy 10 plastic bags full of groceries on your big grocery run. I walk, so I know that 4 cloth bags is plenty for my market trips. I can’t carry more than that. 6 bags should be adequate for drivers who shop for a family.

I have seen cloth shopping bags in piles of used clothing here in Tunisia. That is definitely a good indicator that they are in surplus in the developed world. I bought new cloth bags from a guy in front of the vegetable market. They are very cheap woven synthetic material. I presently have five of them. I think I have had a handle failure with one bag and I used it to contain a pile of outgrown clothing that I put out on the street for people to take. I don’t know how many times I will have to use these bags in order to realize an environmental benefit.

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Let’s get this out of the way first. Plastic waste doesn’t CAUSE flooding. Rain causes flooding.

Discarded plastic bags and plastic bottles DO impact the efficiency of flood control systems in several ways. Besides the obvious potential for clogging drains, plastic waste can also take up a lot of the volume in detention ponds. These problems are either dealt with using taxpayer funded labor and equipment, or they can be ignored with the hope that it never rains all that much. The danger presented by an accumulation of plastic trash in an urban storm drain can prove deadly after days of heavy rain.

Photo credit: bjornmeansbear

Plastic bags were made the scapegoat during a particularly deadly monsoon season in Mumbai in 2005. Plastic bags did clog the system. The system was very old and not designed to deal with the massive population that live in shanties clustered around the city center. The system was also poorly maintained. The system was built before plastic bags were imaginable. Laws against plastic bags had been imposed before the 2005 floods that killed over 1000 people.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have places like Salt Lake County, Utah. It’s not a place where you expect to hear about deadly floods. It’s infrastructure is not particularly ancient or under funded. Plastic garbage does accumulate in the drainage system. Draper is a city of just under 40,000 people and it employs 3 people full time to clean the trash and debris from the drains. There are almost 14 million people in Mumbai. I don’t know if they have 1,000 people cleaning out the storm sewers, but that’s how many people it would take to be proportional to Draper. Littering is more prevalent in the developing world, so Mumbai should probably have several thousand people cleaning out the storm drains. They do have a squad of Plastic Bag Police.

Making an individual choice to use less plastic won’t do much to prevent floods, but if everyone made the same choice it could make a huge difference

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This isn’t exactly a review of Fat Bottom Bags. I chose local solutions as much as possible and these bags are made in the North West of America. They caught my eye because they look quite a bit like the grass basket that my wife bought in Hergla.

Below is a bag made by Berbers from grass…

…Above is a Fat Bottom Bag made from plastic bags

Fat Bottom Bags are made out of single use plastic shopping bags that are supplied by several local households. Christi started out making bags as a hobby and as a way to make use of the bags that had been accumulated in her household and by her extended family. This was an unsustainable system (in a good way for once); the single use bags were being incorporated into durable reusable bags that were put to good use, thus curtailing the accumulation of disposable bags. Rather than move on to another project, Christi chose to broaden her collection efforts to dozens of local families and sell the finished product. I really like this concept. It is a much better idea than putting a pile of plastic bags into the conventional recycling stream. When that happens they could end up on a slow boat to China.

I am happy to add Fat Bottom Bags to my reusable bag roundup post.

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