Paper Or Plastic? Or Neither?
June 8th, 2010 by ComputerBob
Many years ago, I worked as a bag boy at a local grocery store.
I rode my bicycle 3 miles to work and earned $1.35 (USD) per hour.
Back then, every grocery store packed every customer’s groceries in paper bags.
Nice, stiff brown-paper bags with flat sides and rectangular bottoms that were easy to pack, easy to pick up, easy to unpack, easy to stack and store — and that kept your three bagfuls of groceries from spreading out all over your car’s back seat and floor on your way home from the store.
Years later, grocery stores started using thin plastic bags.
They told us it was because they were “environmentally concerned.”
I suspect that it was actually because each plastic bags cost a tiny fraction of the cost of a paper bag.
Back then, the powers-that-be told us that plastic bags were more environmentally friendly than paper bags, because they were recyclable and they didn’t require anyone to chop down any trees.
We believed them, even though we already recycled all of our paper bags by using them as garbage bags; and we all knew that, unlike plastic, trees are a renewable resource.
For the first few years of plastic grocery bag usage, cashiers would ask, “Paper or plastic?” and you would tell them which one you preferred, without feeling like your choice was somehow advertising your concern — or lack of concern — for the environment.
“Paper, please.”
But several years ago, that once-unbiased question subtly changed to a very biased one: “Is plastic OK?”
No mention of paper any more.
Which made it clear that they had their own preference of what to use, but they would grudgingly send someone back to the office to open up the safe and withdraw a couple of ecologically disastrous paper bags to put your groceries in if you were willing to face scrutiny and scornn by verbally refusing their offer of “environmentally friendly” plastic bags.
But the ecological and/or economic tides are apparently changing again, and, as a result, a few communities have already banned the use of plastic shopping bags.
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Consumer Info, Dubious, Ecology, Law