News Item: Reusable Bags Don’t Work If You Don’t Bring Them With You

Just a friendly helpful reminder for us all, courtesy of The Sacramento Bee: reusable bags are only good if you use them. It would seem so obvious that it wouldn’t bear repeating, but sometimes it’s the most obvious things in the world that slip right on by undetected until it’s too late.

Linda Waits wants to help save the environment but, she admits, sometimes even the simplest fixes are easy to forget.

The 52-year-old Land Park resident is actually doing well today – she has remembered to bring her reusable grocery bags, giving herself an earth-friendly alternative to that enduring paper-or-plastic debate.

The article is mostly pretty standard, highlighting the history of reusable bags as they’ve ascended from uber-hippy outpost to environmentally-conscious chic. The standout is its touching on the problem most people seem to have with the bags: leaving them at home, where they are, sadly, of no practical use. Average everyday shoppers are interviewed over how they manage to overcome forgetfulness in an effort to limit their daily detritus.

“I was getting so frustrated (with myself),” says the 27-year-old midtown resident.

So, St. Ofle says, she and her husband vowed to try harder, stocking plenty of bags at home and in the car.

“You have to have tricks – you just have to get yourself into a rhythm of using them,” she says.

Now, St. Ofle uses at least three bags per shopping trip, although, she says, while she appreciates that stores sell their own bags, she just brings generic ones of her own.

“I’m not really tempted to buy (a store bag),” St. Ofle says. “I’m using these bags because waste really bothers me, so why buy more?”

Rhythm is the theme of the day here — buying reusable grocery bags on a whim or out of guilt, the article points out, gets one nothing but a pile of impulse-bought bags collecting dust in a kitchen cupboard. It must become a habit, a way of life: not because you feel like maybe you should, but with the idea that you want to make a difference. Once that idea sets in, you’ll find that, more often, you will.

Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 10:56 am and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.