Accidentally Sustainable - Part 2
As I’m sure you all know, plastic grocery bags are no bueno for the environment. The average American family takes home 1,500 plastic shopping bags per year, and only about 1% of these get recycled (about 15 bags), which means that each household is putting about 1,485 plastic bags into a landfill (or accidentally into nature) each year… YIKES! The good news is, there is a very simple solution to this problem: bring your own re-useable bags to the store.
My mom has done this for as long as I can remember, but for her, the reasoning behind toting her bags to the store had very little to do with helping the environment. So, in honor of Mother’s Day coming up, I thought it would be fun to tell the story of why both my mom and I started using re-useable grocery bags.
At the end of a shopping trip for our household of 7 (plus a dog), there were a LOT of groceries to put away, and not a lot of time to do that in. It was important to my mom to make it as easy as possible, and the way that the teenager at the checkout line would put 2 apples and a tube of toothpaste into a bag and then move onto the next just wasn’t going to cut it. Each time we’d leave the store, it was obvious how much this irked her, but she’d never say anything to the supermarket employee because she didn’t want to be a bother. My brothers and I would just roll our eyes. Surely, she was being dramatic, and the way the bags were loaded was FINE.
Now, fast forward to my sophomore year of college. My friends and I lived together in a townhouse and were no longer on our school’s cafeteria meal plan, which meant we were cooking, and therefore shopping, for ourselves. When I returned home from that first excursion to the store, I found myself absolutely horrified by the way the employee at the supermarket loaded my bags. I was FURIOUS that my bananas had been bagged with cans of beans. My poor, sensitive bananas were bruised and with my limited grocery budget, that was a financial loss I was not willing to deal with.
Now, in stark contrast to my mother, when I feel I’ve been wronged, I take more of my dad’s approach and have absolutely no qualms about starting a confrontation. I was fully ready to go back to the store and give the customer service representative a piece of my mind and try to get back my $1.75… but I had to go to class, so it was going to have to wait for another day. And as I walked across campus, I started to think, “Next time, I’ll just bag it myself. And OOH! I know! I’ll bring along some tote bags so I can make less trips to the car and it will go so much faster. This is brilliant!” And that’s when I realized, to my 19-year-old horror, I should have listened to my mother…
Still, she wanted things a certain way. So, she decided she would try unloading her cart in a specific order onto the belt so that things that made sense together would get bagged together. It worked for some things, but not well enough. So, she tried offering to bag the items herself, but even then, she’d still wind up with more plastic bags than she knew what to do with because the bags were too flimsy to hold more than a few things. Sure, she’d re-use them for dog waste, but it was a lot of trips to and from the car and unfortunately, she didn’t get a lot of help from us (sorry, Mom!)…
Finally, after much trial and error, she found a logical solution – get sturdier bags so they could hold more! She’d load the bags based on where the groceries went in our house often to the point where we could barely lift them, but it worked for her, and her grocery store plight was resolved!
