Please, Please, Please Actually USE Your Reusables

As we know, reusable bags are good. Very, very good. Every time we take them out, every time we halt the production of just a few more disposable plastic bags, we are doing a service to our planet. But what happens when we purchase reusable bags, take some more free promotion bags, and then consistently forget them at home? As the Wall Street Journal reports, if you’re not going to actually use them, they can go from very good to very, very bad in a heartbeat.

Used as they were intended, the totes can be an environmental boon, vastly reducing the number of disposable bags that do wind up in landfills. If each bag is used multiple times — at least once a week — four or five reusable bags can replace 520 plastic bags a year, says Nick Sterling, research director at Natural Capitalism Solutions, a nonprofit focused on corporate sustainability issues.

But well-meaning companies and consumers are finding that shopping bags, like biofuels, are another area where it’s complicated to go green. “If you don’t reuse them, you’re actually worse off by taking one of them,” says Bob Lilienfeld, author of the Use Less Stuff Report, an online newsletter about waste prevention. And because many of the bags are made from heavier material, they’re also likely to sit longer in landfills than their thinner, disposable cousins, according to Ned Thomas, who heads the department of material science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To make a long story short and painfully obvious, it takes resources to make reusable bags, too. If you treat them like disposables, or hoard them up and yet continue to use disposables when you make your weekly shopping trips, the result is even more waste than we begain with.

Maybe the problem is with the newfound ubiquity of reusables. Perhaps it is hard for people to take full ownership of something they received as a free promotion. Maybe, bummer though it is to even think so, people actually need highly overpriced designer bags to make them desirable and valuable enough to use.

But I should really hope not. It’s really not too hard, guys! We just need a little practice. Keep them next to your grocery list, keep them in your car — whatever it takes. We’re trying to save our planet by reducing waste, not speed it along with good intentions. Let’s get on it.

Photo via Flickr!

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 10:06 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.