I agree with you, Meryl. We as a culture really only respond when a surcharge is tacked onto things we otherwise take for granted. This is also something many states already do for other recyclables, so it really should be fair game with plastic bags. This is already the practice in some San Francisco stores.
Also, Tim, no store has ever hung back on handing out plastic bags due to the price of oil. For the past year oil has been up and down and all over the place and 4 out of every 5 times I am in lines with my cloth bags at whatever store, either the cashier or another customer make a snide comment when I say I have my own bags. Last week a checker at Fairway called me a hippie. And it is even worse when you leave NYC...
Also, as for the trash bag scenario, maybe that will caution people to create less trash or take the time to put more of what they perceive as trash in the recycling bins. Or perhaps max out their trash per bag, or dump their trash from a wastecan bagless. That might take them another trip up their steps, but I figure we can all burn a few calories that way.
Original Article:
6 Cents is 6 Cents, But Time? That's Something
I once lived in rural France for half a year, in a region of southern Burgundy known to epicures for its fine cattle and wine. It was also known for being the French boondocks — we got the feeling from Parisian friends that they thought we were living somewhere vaguely akin to a suburb of Binghamton. Indeed, driving to the closest supermarket took close to half an hour, sometimes longer on the occasions when my husband and I realized, 10 minutes into the drive, that we’d forgotten our plastic bags and had to turn right around to get them.
My husband and I weren’t particularly green at the time, which was seven years ago. Nor was anyone else in that rural part of France, as far as we could tell. What they were was frugal. “Everyone has porcupines in their pockets,” a neighbor there once told me — in other words, it really hurt to reach for their wallets. That mattered when it came to plastic bags, because you had to pay for them at the store.
The store, E.Leclerc, was a sprawling emporium that sold household goods along with groceries — think Kmart, only with an entire aisle devoted to 23 varieties of yogurt. The store bags were plastic, but a thickish plastic, with sturdy handles. We always intended to put the empty ones back in the car for the next trip, but every once in a while, they were left behind in the pantry, and then we’d find ourselves in a bind.
The bags were maybe 30 cents each, but it wasn’t just the financial hit that made us waste all that time turning around to go home. It was shame.
You’d start loading your groceries onto the conveyor belt, and then would have to explain to the clerk that you’d forgotten your bags. She would grimace. For some reason, the bags had to be paid for in a separate transaction. This was slightly more laborious for her, and checkout time at E.Leclerc was a precise, even tense, exercise in speed.
Our neighbors timed their grocery shops to the minute: By 11:45, the store was empty, with everyone at home cooking up whatever they’d just bought for lunch. So not only was the store clerk irritated, but the people in back of us were too. Tell the clerk you need to buy bags, and you would get the same reaction that people in New York do when they announce, in some grocery store express line, that they have to pay by check. Groaning, shifting of feet, loud, deliberate sighing.
But it was not just the extra time it took that made those sighs so loaded, those groans so embarrassing. It was the knowledge that most likely, in that entire store, we were the only ones foolish enough to be shelling out $3 for bags that we had sitting around at home, empty, in some pile in the pantry. These were a frugal people, respectful of the porcupine. And we — well, we were Americans.
None of the tsk-tsking was about the landfill. It was about common sense, and the absurdity of the uselessly new. Our neighbors had 100-year-old armoires in their homes, not because they were exquisite antiques, but because someone in their family had bought them around then and they still worked just fine. One neighbor used to come by our house with what we’d call roadpear: pears, some a bit rotting, that he noticed by the side of the road on his way over. He would peel them and sauté them in butter, and we’d all be in roadpear heaven.
Critics of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s recently announced plan to charge a 6-cent fee for plastic bags have argued that the charge could not come at a worse time, now that people are counting every penny with care. But from a green point of view, it could not have come at a better time — even the city’s more affluent shoppers, who once might have considered 6 cents per bag a bargain for the convenience, might quickly change their habits.
So much of the green movement seems to be one big push to upgrade responsibly — in other words, to shop: for green makeup, green clothing, green carpeting. Charging for plastic bags may seem to be adding one more item to the shopping list, but with useless spending going far out of fashion, the opposite might be true.
If the mayor really wants to stop people from using plastic bags, he might consider requiring that the transaction take a few minutes longer. New Yorkers have gotten used to wasting money, but they’ll never put up with wasting time. Especially if you’re standing in front of them, wasting theirs.
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