Your eco-friendly shopping bag could be making you sick, a study says. But before you switch back to plastic, you might want to consider the source.
An overly alarming 15-page paper, published on the Web site for Canada's Environment and Plastics Industry Council, concluded that reusable grocery bags are "a breeding ground for bacteria and pose a public health risk" because of high counts of yeast, molds and bacteria. Download the study here. Our Take: What a joke! The plastics industry just won't stop twisting science and sounding false-alarms to justify our plastic addiction. A great level-headed article from the Tribune that turns a critical eye towards this campaign of misinformation, which many journalists simply regurgitate (one of the inflammatory articles we saw on this industry-funded study was titled "Reusable Grocery Bags May Poison You" - no joke).
Common sense practices like washing your reusable bag and using plastic when worried about leakage can reduce contaminants. When you're choosing a reusable shopping bag, avoid the cheap ones and steer towards high quality, durable bags that withstand washing. In countries like Australia and Ireland, reusable bags have once again become a part of daily life and they haven't experienced any of these health concerns.
Two weeks ago, our founder got a call from Seattle mayor, Greg Nickels, asking for our help in supporting the Seattle bag fee. It's based on Ireland's successful PlasTax, which reduced plastic bag consumption by over 90% - the plastic bag industry is doing everything it can to defeat this measure.
Originally set to take effect Jan 1st of this year, the bag fee was stalled by the plastic bag industry – who’s spent more than $250,000 to preserve their interest in the mindless consumption of throwaway bags. They’ve been successful in stalling or diverting every major initiative proposed in recent years, from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
The Seattle bag fee gets voted on August 18 and we’re doing everything we can to support it. In the six years this company has been around, the Seattle bag fee is the most important piece of legislation we’ve seen. Seattle’s proposed fee is a pure model – taxing plastic and paper bags with a significant 20-cent fee. The initiative will set a trailblazing precedent for cities across the U.S. if it’s re-instated.
We realize you may not live in Seattle, but please consider making a contribution. After all, the opponent's money is coming from outside Seattle. Let's show them that it's not just big industry that's interested in this race, but environmentalists across the nation as well.
Purchase from our store – We’ve committed to donating 1% of sales to the campaign between now and the Aug 18th vote.
Spread the word: If you’re a reporter or blogger, cover the story. Forward this story on to friends. Don’t let these guys win!
Our Take: We’ll do everything in our power to defeat plastic bag industry interests and push through this landmark bag fee. If successful, Seattle may prove to be the tipping point for cities across the nation – and the world.
Listen to the voicemail from the Seattle mayor here & watch a great video they produced about the history of the plastic bag:
Local Chicago artist Cydney Lewis, and friend of our founder Vincent Cobb and his wife Marni, creates one-of-a-kind sculptures out of everyday items. Rather than throwing away plastic, paper, wire and wood, Lewis fashions the would-be trash into wonderful pieces of art.
Lewis's jewelry pieces are being sold at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art.
Our Take: Another example of a growing trend we’re seeing – using throwaway items we think of as trash or a nuisance and turning them into something artistic. Artwork that repurposes our waste helps draw attention to the issue of consumption in a creative way.
The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing polluting chemicals floating in the air.
Which is one reason “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.
Our Take: Another great production from Free Range Studios – we endorse it as a wake-up call about how much we waste in our daily lives. The 20-minute video is quick and easy to digest & fills in the gap in environmental science left by outdated textbooks. We highly recommend watching it.
Plastic retail bags may soon be a thing of the past - or at least, a costly luxury - in Philadelphia.
Under a contentious measure being brought before City Council today, shoppers would be charged 25 cents for every plastic bag they receive at any store. Businesses with more than $1 million in annual sales would give 75 percent of the fees to the city; smaller stores could keep the fees.
Our Take: Unfortunately, the Philadelphia bag initiative failed to pass through the Philadelphia City Council on May 14. Industry interests once again derailed a promising effort to reduce consumption. Like Seattle, Philadelphia’s initiative would have imposed a 25-cent fee on plastic bags, significant enough to curb consumption. Read more about Seattle’s upcoming bag fee vote here.
The Fairfax Farmers Market isn't covered by a new town ban on plastic bags, but that won't stop it from doing away with plastic when it opens for the season Wednesday.
"We're a place that is designed to support a healthy and viable local food system, and the hard realities of plastic are very much opposite that," market manager Amelia Spilger said.
On Monday, Fairfax became the first municipality in Marin to ban the use of plastic bags at restaurants and retail stores, a move approved by voters in November.
Our Take: Fairfax passes a plastic bag ban - it's a step in the right direction, but we believe bag fees do more to change consumption behavior than bag bans. Click here to learn more.
National supermarket chain Kroger is running a "Design Your Own Reusable Bag" contest at locations across the country. The winner gets $1000 gift card and may see his or her design on one of the 99-cent reusable bags sold in Kroger stores. As the second largest retailer in the country, Kroger is positioned to make a real difference in plastic (and paper) bag over-consumption.
Unfortunately, digging a little deeper reveals that the super-chain's efforts are another disappointing example of green-washing. Kroger continues to use plastic bags at thousands of stores nationwide. And the cheap reusable bags they sell do little to solve the problems plastic and paper bags. If the conglomerate was serious about cutting mindless consumption, they would follow in the steps of Ikea or Whole Foods - two corporations doing the hard work to kick our dependence on plastic bags, instead of using the now-trendy reusables movement as a PR opportunity.
Our Take: In a sea of green-washing, our advice remains what it's been for 6 years - buy a handful of high quality reusable bags you will use for years from a company you trust. Read more about the trouble with cheap reusable bags flooding the market here.
A must-see video from San Francisco-based Save the Bay and Free Range Studios shows the tidal wave of plastic bags that threaten our environment, waterways and shorelines.
The group is mobilizing thousands –fighting for legislation to ban or tax all single-use bags in the Bay Area and throughout California. Haunting visuals and powerful statistics combine to inspire us all to kick the disposable bag habit.
Our Take: The best video we’ve seen yet that wakes people up to plastic bag waste. We’ve been an active supporter of Free Range Studios and their powerful, cause-related videos designed to effect change.
Our plastic bag counter was featured on Oprah’s Earth Day Show, “Go Green Save Money,” as a reminder of the thousands of plastic bags consumed every second around the world.
We were also listed in the “Going Green Resources” page at Oprah.com – for our hand-picked selection of 700+ reusables. Many were featured in the Earth Day Lunch Challenge, which shows Oprah encouraging people to switch from disposable lunch options to reusable ones.
Palo Alto's crusade against plastic bags faced its first legal challenge Tuesday, when a coalition of groups filed a lawsuit claiming that the city acted too rashly when it banned plastic bags from local grocery stores last month.
Our Take: The Save the Plastic Bag Coalition strikes again…first Los Angeles, then Santa Monica, now Palo Alto – the lawsuit-happy group may be stalling city initiatives to reduce consumption of bags, but all eyes are on efforts across the country to adopt reusable bags.
My malevolence for the plastic bag was temporarily immobilized today while being delighted by the art group Luzinterruptus' celebration of the vessel, with an "impromptu garden of light," installed near The Prado Museum. The installation, called “A Cloud of Bags Visit the Prado” was illuminated for a period of about 4 hours and included roughly 80 recycled baggies, which were inflated with the aid of the wind.
Our Take: Who knew plastic bags could be something beautiful? We’re seeing a growing number of artists using the object of our ugly addiction to raise awareness about over-consumption.
Seattleites will get to decide whether they're willing to pay a 20-cent-per-plastic bag "green" fee to help the environment.
The City Council on Monday moved to put the question before voters on the Aug. 18 ballot.
Our Take: After a lot of feet-dragging, Seattle residents will finally vote on the bag fee, originally set to take effect Jan 1 of this year. The plastics industry was successful in stalling it, but we hope they won't ultimately derail it. At 20-cents, this bag fee targeting both paper and plastic is a model for cities everywhere to reduce consumption.
ELEVEN OF the 13 members of the D.C. Council are endorsing legislation that would place the District in the forefront of national efforts to reduce local pollution…
In truth, there really is no such thing as a free bag. The cost of bags is built into the prices consumers pay for food. And they pay again -- to the tune of $50 million a year in the District -- to pick up litter and trash, including a lot of plastic bags.
Our Take: As this editorial says, there is no such thing as a “free bag.” Bag fees reveal the invisible cost of paper and plastic bags, normally built into products in the form of higher prices, and give us all the choice to just say ‘no.’ Unfortunately, the 5-cent fee is way too low to change consumption behavior.
"Paper or reusable?" is the question Palo Alto shoppers will face at grocery checkout counters beginning in September.
The city council Monday night voted 7-1 to ban plastic bags at supermarkets in hopes of reducing the stream of harmful litter in local creeks and the San Francisco Bay.
Our Take: Following in San Francisco's footsteps, Palo Alto bans plastic bags at supermarkets, effective Sep. 18. We like their commitment to reducing consumption, however it's fees - not bans - that are the best way to go. Ireland's PlasTax reduced plastic bag consumption by 90% in its first year alone.
A proposal in Colorado to ban plastic bags at supermarkets and other large stores by 2012 passed its first test at the state Capitol on Wednesday…
The proposed ban is opposed by supermarkets, big box stores and department stores. The bill would not apply to smaller stores and franchise operations.
Our Take: Kudos to Colorado for standing strong amid the plastic bag industry’s significant efforts, which have squashed many other city and state bag initiatives. And while we still believe fees are the best way to change consumption behavior, it’s exciting to see this legislation move through the state Senate.
During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York.
Our Take: A cool, artistic take on the plastic bag issue that also shows the ubiquity of plastic bags in our trees, cityscapes and landscapes, sadly.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed a 5-cent fee on new plastic bags at the store register last week… The projected revenue for this “user fee” was $84 million — a sharp increase from the last figure floated, just $16 million.
That breaks down to one bag for every man, woman and child in New York City every single day of the year. The site Reusablebags.com estimates that 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed annually around the globe.
Our Take: We’re glad to hear the NYC bag fee has been expanded beyond grocery stores to include restaurants and other retailers – but we still think 5-cents just isn’t enough to change behavior. While the city may be looking forward to its potential millions in revenue, changing consumption habits is the true goal of a bag fee. Ireland’s heftier PlasTax cut plastic bag use by 90% in the first year alone!
Ontario shoppers carried home 269 million fewer shopping bags in 2007 than they did in 2006.
On the other hand, they still carted off a little more than 4 billion single-use bags over the course of the year. That's 316 bags per year for every man, woman and child in the province. And fewer than one in 12 of those bags found its way into a recycling program.
The Santa Monica City Council was set to adopt an ordinance earlier this month banning single-use plastic bags from all retail establishments in the city, but postponed taking action…
A day before the meeting, the city received a 17-page letter from Stephen Joseph, an attorney representing SaveThePlasticBag.com, which is an association of plastic bag manufacturers and related businesses, stating its intent to file a lawsuit against the city after the ban is passed…
Bill Rosenblatt picks up dozens of plastic bottle caps and cigar tips every time he takes his dog Happy for a walk on the beach.
All told, the former mayor has collected about 5,000 to 10,000 caps and about 2,000 tips from beaches in Asbury Park, Allenhurst and here since November.
"I'm really heartbroken," said Rosenblatt, a Loch Arbour resident and member of the Jersey Shore Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, an international nonprofit environmental group. "What kind of oceans are my grandchildren going to find when they're adults?...Plastic is forever."
Recycling isn't generating the right kind of green these days...
Just months after riding an incredible high, the recycling market has tanked almost in lockstep with the global economic meltdown.
As consumer demand for autos, appliances and new homes dropped, so did the steel and pulp mills' demand for scrap, paper and other recycled materials used to manufacture new products.
Recyclers across the country are finding it more difficult to find buyers. Some are describing the downturn as the worst and most rapid ever.
Amid a recent flurry of worrisome reports about plastic, a simple question came up: Could we live without it?
I decided to try. For one week, I pledged to buy no new plastic and to keep the kids away from it as much as possible.
Our Take: A great article by a working mom that shows it’s possible to make gradual changes towards consuming less plastic in our daily lives. She discovers the wisdom of reusables – and reinforces that none of us will ever eliminate plastic items, but every small step makes a big difference!
After two days of debate and as many as 25 proposed amendments, Toronto council last night voted by a margin of three-to-one for a groundbreaking series of packaging-reduction bylaws.
Our Take: Huge news! While Chicago implemented a bottled water tax in 2008, this is the first bottled water ban we’re aware of – congratulations, Toronto. Banning the sale of plastic water bottles at all city-run facilities is sure to put a dent in consumption. Unfortunately, the 5-cent bag fee voted through just isn’t enough to change consumer behavior.
Our founder, Vincent Cobb, joins Ashkay Rao, program director and professor at University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, to discuss why not all reusable bags are created equal.
“[The 99-cent reusable shopping bag phenomenon] has become a marketing gimmick du jour, big time. It’s an advertisement for the retailer, so they’re very incented to get them out there. If they just sit and accumulate in a closet and you go back to taking plastic bags, then yeah, you have done a net negative.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
has called for charging shoppers 6 cents for every plastic bag
needed at the register.
If
the proposal passes, New York City would follow the lead of many European
countries and become one of the first places in the United States to assess a
so-called plastic bag tax.
Our Take: While we applaud a
consumption-based fee of any kind, 6 cents
just isn't enough to change behavior. The
main objective of Ireland's hugely
successful PlasTax was to cut consumption. This seems designed
to create an ongoing revenue
stream for a struggling municipality, while
reducing consumption a little.
We doubt anything less than 25 cents will work.
The City Council appears unlikely to tax and ultimately ban plastic shopping bags, despite a recommendation from staffers that Dallas do away with them for environmental reasons...
The plan [Eric Griffin, interim director of the city’s Office of Environmental Quality] suggested involved seeking state authority to levy a fee of 5 cents per bag on consumers in Dallas to initiate a ban in three to five years if the fee did not substantially reduce the number of bags used.
Our Take:
Dallas would have joined the likes of Ireland in passing a bag fee – the most successful government initiative to overconsumption of plastic and paper bags. As in Seattle, industry interests are effectively squashing the issue with misinformation and money, and legislators aren’t fighting back – whether because of a lack of resources or simply feeling overpowered.
They’re missing out: Ireland's PlasTax cut plastic bag consumption by 90% and generated $9.6 million in its first year alone, earmarked to improve the environment. Talk about a win-win (or in this case, a lose-lose).
Wal-Mart Stores Inc will give out fewer plastic shopping bags, and encourage shoppers to reuse and recycle them, as the retailer aims to slash its plastic bag waste by a third worldwide by 2013.
Environmental Leader 10.06.08
IKEA announced that starting this month, the company will no longer be offering plastic or paper bags at any of its U.S. stores. They will only offer reusable bags.
Our Take: Ikea’s plastic bag ban has great sound bite appeal and while we applaud Wal-Mart for doing some of the harder work to reduce consumption, cheap reusable bags aren’t going to solve the problem either. Let’s not forget, part of Wal-Mart’s strategy is to have millions of people carrying around reusable shopping bags with their logo. It’s a crafty form of free advertising for the company that shouts “Wal-Mart’s green!”
We’d love to see both retailers adopt some of the progressive tactics of other retailers – charge for plastic bags and offer a credit for any reusable shopping bag customers bring with them.
Plastic packaging and bottles that consumers believe are going to local recycling plants are ending up buried in India, according to a UK news investigation.
[Reporter] Mark Jordan travelled to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and discovered wells of British-branded rubbish, estimated to be around 30 feet deep...Concerned locals told the investigation that there were at least ten such waste wells and that the pits also contained American waste.
Our Take: It’s an inconvenient truth that many items entering the
recycling stream don’t get recycled. We’re seeing increasing evidence
of recyclables getting burned or buried in landfills -- or shipped
overseas. Recycling has its place in reducing waste -- but it’s no
silver bullet (e.g., it doesn’t change consumption).
Want to learn more about why recycling doesn’t work for plastic bags? See our myth-busting article:Recycling Can Fix This, Right?
Shouldn't we all, with the price of oil - yes, they're made with oil - and environmental worries, be moving to reusable shopping bags and bins? Plastic shopping bags are a blight, and they never - for all practical purposes - go away.
Like that cool site that tracks the growth of the U.S. national debt, Reusable Bags shows the growing number of plastic bags used around the world. It's almost 1 million every minute.
Maui native Micah Wolf teams up with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and photographer Ben Moon to create this powerful music video that empowers us to do something about the amount of plastics in our oceans.
Of 500,000 albatross chicks born each year on Midway Atoll, about 200,000 die of starvation. The awful truth—in their searches of the ocean surface, albatrosses mistake plastic trash for food and end up feeding Lego blocks, clothespins, plastic bag bits and a host of other man-made junk to their chicks. As a result, the large amount of plastic crowding the chick’s stomach leaves little room for food and liquid. The amount of plastic floating in our oceans has grown dramatically over the last fifty years. Anthony L. Andrady, a polymer chemist at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina says that plastic takes decades to break down on land, but even longer at sea because the water keeps the plastic cool and algae blocks ultraviolet rays. “Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere.”
A couple of websites recently caught our attention, each detailing the Sci-Fi-esque (but very real) floating plastic island located approximately 500 nautical miles off the California coast. "The island" is a grotesquely large patch of floating plastic trash held together by currents stretching across the northern Pacific almost as far as Japan. Discovered by Charles Moore, this "plastic island" is made up of about 7 billion pounds of plastic garbage.
Sea preserves a plastic plague - LA Times 08.03.07
The LA Times produced a fantastic five-part multimedia series on the state of our altered oceans. Part four delves into the “plastic island”, officially called a gyre. This disturbing presentation features great videos, haunting photography and lots of helpful information. Link: Sea preserves a plastic plague
Plastic patch in pacific grows to twice the size of the US - Daily Kos 02.06.08
Another great site investigating this mess is the Daily Kos. They feature an interview with Marcus Eriksen, one of the research directors at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (the same folks sailing the “Junk Raft”). Eriksen said: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States." Link: Plastic patch in pacific grows to twice the size of the US
The trash vortex - Greenpeace International 11.12.06
Greenpeace created this cool, simple visual explaining “the island”—“Plastic trash and other flotsam that is either directly thrown or washed by rivers into the North Pacific, is swept up by the currents of a gigantic swirling vortex called the North Pacific Gyre. In the centre, the calm, just northeast of Hawai’i the result is a trash carpet that scientists calculate has now reached the size of Texas.” Link: The Trash Vortex
Our Take: There is a similarity between this huge plastic island in the middle of the ocean and the enormity of plastic bag consumption. Scientists can't agree on the size of "the island" just like no one knows exactly how many plastic bags are being produced and consumed. The one thing everyone agrees on is that the scale of both is huge and deserves our attention. This "island" is the direct effect of our overconsumption. By achieving a significant reduction in use-and-toss items, we can actually make a difference.
On Monday, the City Council [of Seattle] approved a 20-cent fee, starting in January, for each disposable paper or plastic bag used at grocery, drug and convenience stores. While other U.S. cities have banned plastic bags, Seattle is believed to be the first to discourage use by charging a fee. Although the new fee may force Seattle residents to permanently alter their shopping habits, council members said the environmentally correct behavior will become natural, just like recycling.
The city plans to give at least one free, reusable bag to each household, and the council directed Seattle Public Utilities to come up with a plan by the end of November on how to provide extra bags to low-income residents.
Our Take: This is major news. Seattle is the first U.S. city to follow Ireland's lead in implementing a successful plastic bag fee model. We are confident that Seattle residents will alter their shopping habits quickly - reusable shopping bags will become an integrated part of life in the Emerald City and plastic bag overconsumption will disappear. Seattle City Councilmember, Tim Burgess said it best - "I think that after a few months of legislation, we will wonder what all the fuss is about."
Watch for the plastic bag industry to violently attack this fee based model since it represents the beginning of a paradigm shift.
Late last week, a fantastic slide show making its way around the internet
caught our eye. Using a potent
combination of facts and images, it
tells the story of plastic bag
over-consumption we first laid out at our web
site five years ago. Its short, visual format
provides an incredible tool to educate and
inform.
We liked the slide show so much, we hustled to:
Convert and post it as an easy-to-view
video on YouTube, opening it up to millions
worldwide.
Discover who produced it and give them
credit. It turns out to be a fellow
Chicagoan! Vishal Mody - a public school
teacher.
Share it with you, our 80,000+
newsletter subscribers, and post it in our Newsroom.
Please take just 4 minutes to watch it and help spread the word!
The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to ban plastic carryout bags in the city's supermarkets and stores by July 2010 -- but only if the state fails to impose a 25-cent fee on every shopper who requests them.
Council members said they hope an impending ban would spur consumers to begin carrying canvas or other reusable bags, reducing the amount of plastic that washes into the city's storm drains and the ocean.
"This is a major moment for our city, to bite the bullet and go with something that is more ecologically sensitive than what we've ever done before," said Councilman Bill Rosendahl...
Our Take: Bravo, California! Los Angeles joins the ranks of San Francisco in reducing plastic bag consumption. However, the biggest news is not the ban, but that Los Angeles is the first major U.S. city to vote to implement a plastic bag tax, by charging $.25 for “use-and-toss” bags, should the legislature not pass a statewide ban. A similar Plastax in Ireland reduced plastic bag consumption by 90%, and we are really excited to see the first U.S. effort to do the same. Even more importantly, Los Angeles also takes aim at paper bags, sending the message that over consumption of any kind is wasteful.
Los Angeles alone will put a dent in plastic bag consumption by reducing the 2.3 billion plastic bags it uses each year. We hope the city proves to be a model for many more across the nation.
Portlanders drive an average of three fewer miles a day than the average American Joe. We have more certified green buildings per capita than any other U.S. city. Time to kick back with an organic IPA and watch the clouds go by, right? Hardly. Wake up, Portland. We’re slipping. Sometime between Gov. Tom McCall’s speeches and Al Gore’s Nobel Prize, Portland ceded the green crown.
A group of very ill cows was taken to a local veterinary hospital, anaesthetized and surgically examined. It turned out, says Indian journalist Subhash Mishra, that inside their stomachs was an extraordinary number of plastic bags. "More than 50, 60 bags," per cow, he recalls. Listen to story… Link: India cow killer bagged, but deaths continue
The Courant, 06.12.08 Last March, IKEA began charging 5 cents for each plastic bag with the hopes of reducing usage by 50 percent. Last month, they announced that not only is the fee working, they have experienced a 92 percent drop in usage.
Our Take: Our congratulations to IKEA for being a strong leader in a sea of mindless consumption. They see that use-and-toss shopping bagsâwhether plastic or paperâare at the heart of the issue. This is more evidence that fees work. We are proud to have helped inspire them to take this bold step and hope that other retailers will follow suit. What do you think?
