This guest Slog post is by Seattle City Council member Mike O’Brien
On Thursday, December 16 at noon, I will be joining volunteers from the Surfrider Foundation at Westlake Center (4th & Pine) to distribute reusable bags to shoppers in honor of “Day Without a Bag.” I currently chair the Seattle Public Utilities and Neighborhoods Commission, and recent estimates suggest Seattleites use 292 million disposable plastic bags every year. Less than 5 percent are recycled, while the other 95 percent end up in landfills, streams, lakes and forests.
The holiday shopping season is in full swing, and we can all help cut back on waste this year by taking our reusable bags on these outings, too. Plastic bags aren’t just ugly litter; they’re especially harmful to our marine environment. Virtually every piece of plastic ever produced still exists in some form, no matter how small, and much of it is floating in the ocean where marine mammals and birds mistake it for food or become entangled in it. This debris causes marine life deaths throughout the world, and earlier this year, a gray whale washed up in West Seattle with a stomach filled with debris that included 20 plastic bags.
Day Without A Bag reminds us that there are some easy things we can all do this holiday season to reduce our impact on the environment. Supported by retailers and consumers, Day Without Bag is raising awareness and initiating a small change in our behavior that is good for the environment and good for our pocket book. I hope you join me in pledging not using any disposable bags on December 16.
You get twenty million internets for being an elected official offered a free platform AND WRITING THREE SNAPPY PARAGRAPHS ONLY. If I wore a cap I’d doff it out of respect, but I guess all I can do is say yes to your bag thing and promise to vote for you next time too.
Remember, if you give gifts in a reuseable gift bag, it’s a prime candidate for REUSE REDUCE RECYCLE.
Friends don’t let friends fill up their recycle bin.
That said, I haven’t bought trash bags for a few years now, thanks to nifty plastic bags from stores.
I’m saving the environment by keeping five hundred reusable bags on the floor of the back seat of my car, where I forget to bring them in every single time.
How about just using PAPER BAGS? Recycled/recycle-able ones even? I rarely have the opportunity or foresight to bring a reusable tote to the grocery store and so paper is an easy choice.
My own feeling is that it’s lower-end shoppers who most need free reusable bags, not people at Westlake Center. I’d hazard a guess that the folks who shop at discount grocery stores and convenience stores are using plenty of plastic bags and would really benefit from the free reusable bags that now get handed out at places like Whole Foods, Westlake Center, downtown Ballard, blah-di-blah.
Not to be a naysayer, it’s just… I feel like higher-income people are convinced. Oh, and no one wants to buy clothes and put them in a reusable bag.
Last year, I gave reusable shopping bags from Blue Q as presents, with more little presents in them…get it? The bag *is* the present…(this moment of Zen is brought to you by Drixoral…)
I just wear a big backpack all the time. Reusable tote bags are pretty useless if you bicycle everywhere. /smug-environmentalist-cyclist
I have the same problem Fnarf has. Maybe a better system would involve the store handing out cloth bags for a one dollar refundable fee, so on the one day I remember to bring back my the ten to twenty bags I’ve accumulated I’d get $10-20 back. And people who can actually remember to bring the bag back and forth can still do that, and people to lazy to bring bags back can just pay for each bag they use.
In DC, a 5 cent fee for plastic bags got instituted at the start of the year and the transition has been utterly pain-free. Hardly anyone uses plastic bags now.
I have a large reusable bag filled with other reusable bags and hang it on the front door. Then I never forget to bring one. It’s so easy that I can’t imagine how/why we didn’t do this earlier. People just need a slight incentive to do the right thing.
At Daiso – the Japanese 100 Yen shop (Basement of Westlake Center) they have tons of super cute and durable nylon shopping bags that fold up into a tiny tampon-sized pocket, and fold out to be as large as a regular plastic grocery bag….plus they’re on keyrings so you can connect a few together and always have enough bags for your shopping needs!!! Plus they’re only 1.50 each…I pretty much give them as gifts to everyone for every occasion, as they are awesome.
That is absolutely right! From using them to carry my fishing gear, overnight trips, camping supplies, kids outings and overnights! there are hundreds if not thousands of reasons to use your reusable bag(s)
Thanks for the great read!
Douglas Lober
President/Owner
http://reusethisbag.com