Random Access

Emblazoned on the canvas bags that they hand out as promotional items, EcoSource Mississauga has printed the following message: “The truth about our plastic bag addiction is that society consumes well over 500,000,000,000 (that’s 500 billion!) plastic bags annually, or almost 1 million per minute.”
When the archeologists dig up the remains of our generation, we will be surely be known as the Age of Plastic since so much of our refuse won’t decompose because of the durability of the material. The Age of Reason, you’ll note, is long passed.
The Toronto press today is full of the story of how a City councillor there has declared war on plastic bags. Their bags go to the dump, unlike in Mississauga where film plastic is at least collected in the blue box while Peel Region tries to find a market for it.
There are signs of hope that our addiction to those deceptively flimsy plastic bags, which can persist up to 1,000 years, is waning. Grocery stores finally seem to be getting the idea that they should be encouraging people to use alternatives. My local Longo’s had a promotion last Earth Day to sell their large, sturdy bags for 99 cents each.
Lee Ann Mallett, executive director of EcoSource, says people forget that the first R in the 3Rs is Reduce, and the last is Recycle, not the other way around. It’s a lot better to use a canvas bag to carry your groceries home than to put a plastic bag in the blue box, where we as a society pay for its collection, processing and the energy used to make it into a new product — if a market can be found.
Getting the grocery chains on side is critical to changing behaviour because when people are in the checkout line, they use what’s available. It is a good thing that some stores give you a few cents of credit for bringing your own bags. It is a better thing that stores are starting to charge people for plastic, although Mallett says, “it would be a lot better if they charged the real cost.”
If people realized the negative impact that plastic has on our wildlife, oceans and watercourses, they would be much more likely to pick up a canvas bag. Plastic washes into catch basins and blocks drainage, greatly increasing flooding and damage in heavy storms.
About a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals (including 30,000 seals) and turtles are killed by plastic marine litter every year, around the world.
Plastic blows out of landfills and finds its way hundreds and thousands of miles to lakes and oceans.
More than 140 marine species become entangled in debris and even more are likely to eat it.
“All you have to do is see your pet at home play with a bag and see how they get caught in the handles to understand what can happen,” says Mallett. “Yet people forget about that.”
Some jurisdictions are moving to plastic bag taxes as a deterrent. Big Plastic is fighting back.
We can all fight back in this case, simply by employing reuseable bags. Yes, you have to launder them every once in a while. And you will find yourselves packing grocery bags yourselves, because store clerks seem to automatically think that you should supply the labour if you supply the bag. Those are tiny drawbacks in the big picture, however.
If you want to see how staggeringly big the problem really is, visit http://www.reusablebags.com/ and check out the running plastic bag use counter on the
front page.