Through the combined efforts of consumers and retailers, reusable tote bags are showing plastic bags the door. This is an update of a post I first wrote at WTF? Random Food for Thought.

Those awful plastic grocery bags are fading fast. On April 22 [Earth Day, get it?], the entire Whole Foods grocery chain went plastic bag-free. Grocery stores and general retailers alike are now selling reusable totes, usually for a buck or two, to encourage customers to just say no to plastic.

And China, not exactly a shining example of environmentalism, has banned plastic bags from the entire country. As of June 1, all stores, from the largest to the smallest, have gone bag-free. For the practical Chinese, it’s a matter of not wasting 37 million barrels of oil a year on bags. It was also a chance to polish their image for the Olympics. Whatever the reason, it’s good news for the planet.

The problems with plastic bags are many. First, they don’t biodegrade, as paper does. They photodegrade—which is to say that light causes them break up into tinier and tinier particles, but they never stop being plastic. According to a New York Times article [first brought to my attention by Kirsten over at Gezellig Girl], “Altogether, each year the country is estimated to use 86 billion bags, which end up blowing down city streets, or tangled in the stomachs of whales and sea turtles, or buried in landfills where, environmental organizations say, they persist for as long as 1,000 years.” And even if you recycle them, as more communities are now mandating, plastic degrades in quality with each recycling, so it’s not truly sustainable. Continue reading “Stuff we like: Totes, canvas and otherwise” →