Be Green: A Small Bag Change

Everyday a large number of consumers walk, bike, or drive to their local grocery store to purchase a variety of products. It seems that the local grocery store has now become the local buy anything and everything store.
The average household has a huge hoard of plastic grocery bags, flying out of every pantry and cupboard in their home. In recent years several provinces and states have put bans and controls on plastic shopping bags. These vary from a fee on each individual bag to discourage usage, to a complete ban on plastic grocery bags altogether.
Just recently there has been a few big moves which hopefully will have a large successful impact. One hopes these moves shall get people looking at the reality of a product that they are using and than disposing of without a thought.
China State Council has banned plastic shopping bags effective June 1st, 2008. In a recent story from CBC.ca on January 8th, 2008 CBC discusses the ban in China and other such related bans. The article states that worldwide on average, we throw away 500 billion plastic shopping bags annually that can take up to 1, 000 years to fully decompose.
The Oprah Winfrey recently aired January 3rd, 2008 a show called "It's Easy Being Green” . The episode discussed ways that we can help to have a clean environment. Just by making small changes in our day to day lives within and outside the household we can make the earth a healthier place for ourselves and the environment. The discussion talking about plastic shopping bags specifically stated that of the 500 billion plastic bags we thrown away in the world annually, 380 million of them are in the United States alone. It also discussed the fact that for a while people were trying to substitute paper bags for plastic ones, but in order to produce 10 billion paper bags we would have to be cutting down 14 million trees a year.

You might ask what's the best plan?
We need to use cloth, re-usable bags, no paper, and no plastic, because they're both damaging to our environment in different ways. If we opt to use cloth bags we are making a move to save our environment for the future. We quite possibly will save ourselves money. Even though we don't have bans on plastic shopping bags yet across North America and there will be a slight fee for every cloth bag that you purchased.
Oprah has made it possible for people to purchase a cloth bag from her website, the cloth bags are featured as the "O grocery bag". It is made of 100% organic cotton that no type of chemical was used during the production. But if you're not an Oprah fan, or don't care for making purchases over the World Wide Web, a simple re-usable cloth bag from your local dollar store will do the trick.

It makes sense; why not make this change for our environment? It will help ourselves, our kids and future generations. We can only be excited for something that will make such a great difference and yet is so easy to do. So make a difference and DO “a small bag change".
Mary-Jane Martin
Eco-Tourism Student Class of 2009