Seems like everywhere I turn people are lamenting the impact of the plastic bags available at the grocery store. The trend seems to have caught on and everyone and their mother are purchasing nice pretty and new canvas totes to pick up their groceries with. What has amazed me is that I haven’t heard anyone acknowledge the irony in this. We critique the rampant consumerism and environmental degradation of plastic grocery bags that fill landfills, waste energy, and acknowledge our disposable society, and our answer to that problem: Buy something. Buy a bag, a nice pretty canvas tote with trendy design and take it to the grocery store and show it off.

While we think we’ve done some great act for the environment, we’ve in some ways simply traded one consumable product for another. We need to think more critically about this. We need to raise some questions about our consumerism and think hard about our choices:

1. Is plastic Bad? If you think it is and should be used in moderation, then we need to make a serious effort to reduce our use of plastic across the board, not just shopping bags. And may I suggest we do this buy purchasing non-plastic products when it’s necessary to buy something new, but even better, simply buy used.
2. Can you reuse Plastic? Since moving out of my parents home I have never spent a dime on trash bags. Instead, we’ve used those dreaded plastic grocery bags as our kitchen, bathroom and other trash can liners. We also used reused them to get our groceries time and again until we accumulated enough cloth bags for our shopping. I use the plastic bags to carry dirty cloth diapers when we are out. And if we had a dog, I’d be using the bags for clean up there too.

My goal is not to discourage anyone from using cloth bags, but to think more critically about our purchasing and lifestyle, rather then simply following the trends, even if they are ‘green’ trends. Personally, I use cloth bags quite often for groceries. It’s been fun to see the change in attitude in the checkout line at the grocery store. We used to walk to the store with a couple backpacks and a cloth bag and when checking out we’d tell them we were going to bag it ourselves in our own bags and we’d get very strange looks. Now it’s not that big of a deal (And Aldi’s and Cub you bag yourself anyways). We’ve reduced our trash output so much that I don’t need many plastic bags for that anymore.
If your going to purchase cloth bags make sure they are environmentally friendly and fair trade. I’d recommend Simply Neutral, they’ve got both grocery and produce bags, which I received as an awesome present from my sister-in-law. Now I can go all cloth for even the largest shopping trips.