Reusable Bags Can’t Work With Food Banks… Or CAN They?

In an opinion piece I covered earlier this year, Bob Pratte from the Riverside Press-Enterprise listed off a lot of self-serving reasons why disposable plastic bags should remain in circulation, but one good-intentioned bullet point was that the bags are needed to distribute food at local food banks.

Plastic bags are dropped off in a collection container near the front door of city hall. They are reused to bag groceries at food banks for the needy.

In Hemet, Sandy Jernegan, who directs the Community Pantry food bank for the poor, worries about the possibility of a state-wide ban of plastic bags.

“It would be horrible,” she said.

It’s a good guilt trip, for sure. Who would want to hold up production lines at food banks? No one in their right minds, obviously. Of course, it’s another false dichotomy: “keep disposable bags in production or else the poor will have no more access to food” is a ludicrous assumption, and once again Canada is charged with showing us the way.

AFTER A slow start last month, the Terrace Churches Food Bank handed out more food than last year.

The food bank distributed 543 bags of food and saw 364 families last week, the highest the volunteers have seen in a year, according to the vice president of the food bank. However the number is still lower than a couple of years ago, said Dennis Brewer.

“You know we’ve been down all year really from what we had been running a couple of years ago,” said Brewer, adding he believed that was a good sign.

In November 2007, 575 bags of food were distributed and 382 families received help from the food bank.

Oh hey, that’s less families needing food, but more food per family! Sounds like Terrace Churches Food Bank has a really thing going, and they owe it all to disposable plastic bags… wait, what?

For the first time, the food bank moved toward going green with reusable bags in an attempt to eliminate the use of plastic bags, Brewer said. Food bank clients were given black bags to carry their food, some of which were bought by volunteers and others that were donated by Canadian Tire.

They were told to bring the bags back next time, which shouldn’t be a problem, Brewer said.

That sounds like a recipe for disaster, and I’m sure no one followed through with it. No one ever remembers their disposable bags. How did they manage?

“Surprisingly, quite a few people do come with their own reusable bags,” Brewer said. “It’s surprising. We used to hand out heavy duty Marriott Hotel bags we bought years ago and we haven’t handed any of these out in, I guess a year, and still people bring them back to fill,” he said.

Oh. So what you’re saying is that, even if it’s not 100%, handing out reusable bags can still have a successful and beneficial impact within the food bank system? You don’t say. I wonder what Mr. Pratte would have to say about this one…

Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 10:33 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.