Stranglers

At a grocery in Tuscany, mebbe ten years ago, I was surprised and not at all unhappy, to be charged for the single use plastic bags I needed to tote my pecorino and Chianti home. Now, there’s a great way to motivate people to bring their own reusable shopping bags everywhere. Charge for those suckers OR just stop offering them at all.

In hot local news:

Hingham to vote on ban of single-use shopping bags
Stores may provide recyclable paper bags for customers, provided they charge at least 10 cents for each bag. Such bags would have to meet certain criteria, including that they be made of at least 40 percent post-consumer recycled material and display the word “recyclable” on the outside.

Hingham’s a posh suburb of Boston, two towns south of us peasants here in Quincy. There’s an abundance of mansions (real ones, not the mini sort. Well those exist too but, dahlings, they’re SO déclassée!) and yachts. These folks have paid big bucks for their patch of blue—I'd think they'd be ALL about protecting their investment from being polluted by plastics—but they're just voting on this now. What took them so long?

Hells, Dallas, Texas (NOT near an ocean, by the by) started charging for turtle stranglers last year.

What is post-consumer waste and what’s pre-consumer waste, you ask?
From Mother Nature Network:

Post-consumer waste is the trash produced when someone has used – that’s past tense – and disposed of piece of paper, soda can, or any other product. The term describes the process most people imagine when they think of recycling: you bind last week’s newspapers, set them on the sidewalk and they’re trucked away to a plant that breaks them down, cleans them up, and sells the stuff as non-virgin paper pulp.
 Pre-consumer waste, on the other hand, is byproduct from the paper manufacturing process, such as the trimmings left over after the paper is cut to size. It’s silly and misleading when companies advertise pre-consumer paper waste as having been “recycled,” because in fact, it hasn’t ever left the manufacturing plant. That’s like saying you're “recycling” sugar cookie dough when you take the scraps left outside the cookie cutter, ball them up, and roll out another sheet.

 40 percent post-consumer recycled material isn’t all that much. Why not more? With one simple, fast Googling, I found a supplier for 95% post-consumer content brown kraft shopping bags. Surely the yachtsmen and women of Hingham could find, in their diamond studded, platinum trimmed hearts, the forward thinking wherewithal to spring for the extra special earth benefiting sacks.

Here in working class Quincy, The Amazing Bob and I do most of our food shopping at Stop and Shop. It’s close, has good prices and a decent selection of organics, wild caught and free range. They still offer the single use plastic bags though. It sickens me to see someone who’s done a month’s worth of buying, having it all packed up in these small, sea suffocating totes. I totally understand that sometimes a person leaves the house and forgets their reusable bags. I get that. I always leave a few in the back of Bix because I KNOW I’m forgetful. If I still manage to forget, I buy another reusable bag. They’re cheap at a buck or two a throw and they’re handy as hell for more than just shopping.

Here’s something new at Stop and Shop and I want/need to know more about this.

We also offer new, environmentally friendly, plastic bags for only $.10. These bags can be re-used, will hold more items than regular plastic bags and eliminate the need for double-bagging.

These new bags—they’re plastic. Mind, they’re much heavier than those small thin, single use things but, I wanna know, are they made from recycled plastic bags? What do they mean by “environmentally friendly, plastic?” Is that even possible? As yet, I’ve not found more info. I’ll stick to the sturdier reusables, thanks.

And here's something else:

All of our stores also offer plastic bag recycling. Bring your plastic shopping bags to our stores and we’ll send them, plus all of our shrink wrap, to our plastics recycling company to become composite decking. To date, we’ve collected millions of pounds of bags for recycling.

I wonder how many folks take advantage of this. TAB and I end up using the sacks we occasionally end up with as bin liners in the bathroom and bedroom. This seems like a silly, if convenient, thing to do. Why not, once the little waste basket’s full, just dump it into the main bin? If the interior’s dirty, just rinse it out?

I’m getting there, oh yes I am.

In the meantime, who should I talk with about getting those demon bags banned here in Quincy?