Bring Your Own Bag

Here's an article I submitted to the Free Press yesterday. Today's paper contains an article by Tom Ford on the very same subject in a very similar vein, so it seems unlikely that I will be able to collect any cash for this effort. Here it is anyways.


Although I own enough cloth shopping bags to match every outfit in my wardrobe and try to refuse plastic bags whenever they are offered—which in case you haven’t noticed is virtually every time you purchase something irregardless of quantity or size—I still have a massive cache of shopping bags, representing a wide range of retailers, under my sink. I can only swoon when I consider how many more reside in the broom closets of less fastidious people.

On April 2nd the Manitoba community of Leaf Rapids became the first in Canada to implement a radical remedy to the almost pathological way in which plastic bags are shoveled at shoppers by imposing an all out ban. Unsurprisingly, given our current penchant for environmental issues, this news has met with great interest across the country. It has even prompted the Canadian Plastics Industry Association to develop a damage-control strategy, as was evident in a recent letter published by one of its executives in Saturday’s Free Press.

The industry claims it is doing society a huge favour by providing us with so many “kitchen catchers.” If not for the zillions of light weight bags they so generously supply we’d be buying heavier gauge garbage bags which, according to their studies, will produce an even greater burden on the environment. Counter-intuitive as it sounds they actually claim that banning the wind-blown blights, which currently decorate the treetops of communities from coast to coast, will result in more plastic being sent to the dump.

Questionable industry-sponsored studies aside, this by-law is still highly contentious. The legality of imposing a ban of this sort on retailers, some lawyers have suggested, is beyond the jurisdiction of municipalities and would likely not survive a court challenge. In the context of Leaf Rapids a suit seems unlikely, especially given that the town of 500 received a donation of 5000 reusable bags from an Ontario manufacturer. But as larger communities look to enact similar legislation it becomes a very significant point.

Having government dictate how businesses can treat their patrons goes against the very nature of the free-market, and our freedom of choice. However, our compulsion to consume goes hand in hand with a sense that it is convenient, so the incentive for retailers to curtail the shopping-bag insanity simply do not exist. While environmental issues are gaining traction everywhere, retail is an industry where personal and courteous service are king. Offering a bag seems like a friendly gesture, whereas suggesting that one bring one’s own, no matter the good intentions, is offensive to many customers.

Waging war on the plastic bag pestilence that gnaws at this nation—trivial as it seems in comparison to a great many graver environmental concerns—is a worthwhile pursuit. Shopping bags swirling on the sidewalk are a powerful symbol of the obliviousness we show towards our wasteful and ecologically unsustainable patterns of consumption.

Drastic measures like banning plastic shopping bags help us question the wisdom of automatically plopping an already amply packaged item into another layer of plastic for the sake of convenience. If we had a few dozen less “kitchen catchers” on hand and actually ran out occasionally we might take time to consider how much trash our lifestyles produce. Perhaps, if there were fewer bags to carry all our purchases home, we might even be tempted to bring home less stuff.

Personally, I look forward to the day when I don’t have to say: “No thanks, I’ve got my own bag,” before the first item is even scanned, in order stay a clerk’s robotic impulse to bag.