I run into that problem myself. Sometimes I’ll just leave everything loose in the cart, and then put it in bags once I’m back at the truck. The Costco Model of grocery containment.
I could probably get a lot of mileage out of a few various-sized cardboard boxes used much as you describe.
Occasional wet weather or no, I really don’t recall paper-bag grocery shopping to be that big of a problem on the balance. Admittedly, here in suburbia there’s never really any call to carry a paper bag of groceries any appreciable distance. Grocery store to car and then car to front door. In urban areas where people regularly walk 10 blocks with paper bags … well, doing that in the rain must be a decidedly different proposition.
Whole Foods uses paper bags. We’ve been getting delivery from them since the pandemic started. We reuse some for gathering recyclables in the house. When full, they go in the recycling bin in the garage (unused bags go directly into that bin).
I don’t get food delivery. Can’t, and probably wouldn’t if I could.
The county where I shop started having all retailers charge 10 cents for every bag. OK, that’s fine. One of the big impetus for doing that was littering, and plastic bags that would blow into trees and stay there for years.
So I bought the reusables. I rarely wash them. Not much point in it IMHO.
But I still use plastic for any number of things. We don’t get trash collection, so the dog pop we pick up goes in the car to take to the dump. I burn it when there is not a burn ban on.
The bags can be very handy. So the side effect here, is I buy them. You can get a flat of them at Amazon.
Why can’t the new bags be used for landfill type garbage, as much as the old ones?
I have been using the same re-usable bags for probably 30 years. They are made of nylon or something similar, so not completely virtuous, but they are well-made and capacious, and I’ve never had to do anything but occasionally put them in the washer (and hang them dry). What I hate about the bags offered by my usual grocery store is that they are basically flat bags that don’t hold very much, and so any re-usability is roughly nil. They don’t have to be that way, but I’m sure they are cheaper to make than well-formed bags.
This is my other main problem with these kinds of bags. They’re huge. If I’m buying 5 loaves of white bread and a bag of Ruffles, no problem, but if I’m buying a few dozen cans and jars, that can quickly become a 50 lb bag even half-full, and store checkers don’t care.
I don’t live in a city, so it’s unclear to me what effect plastic bag bans have on dog owners disposing of their pets’ waste. I suspect it isn’t good. Environmental groups’ suggestions for dealing with dog poop can be less than practical.
“Yes, plastic bags are handy for picking up animal waste, but there are alternative and easy ways to continue to be a responsible pet owner! For example, you can bring last week’s newspaper on your walk and use it to pick up poop.”
Yep, lots of people have access to newspapers these days for dog waste (and such a practical mode of disposal, especially when the beast’s output is less than…solid, shall we say). Their other proposal (using plastic wrapping for grocery items as a substitute for bags) isn’t such a great idea either, as the orifices of such wrappings are generally insufficient for clean and efficient encasing of canine droppings.
We need much better biodegradable plastic bags and other products. The current ones take way too long to disintegrate, and it’s unclear what effects their tiny breakdown products have on the environment.
Yeah, in the era of “charging 10 cents for plastic bags”, it seems a lot of people decided to cheap out and try to stuff as much as possible into each bag. But if I’m standing there with 6 or 7 reusable bags, that I’ve already paid for, spread things out. Don’t hand me three overloaded bags and four empty ones!
I’m not talking about ‘walks’ if that was addressed to me. I live remote. And we take them on hikes right out our back door. It’s often not even on a trail. They don’t generally do there business when walking.
The poop we deal with is in their fenced in yard. The yard is about 3000’.
I do try to burn it when I can, I try to have a fire every year to clean up downed branches and things. It’s called defensible space (from fire).
First of all, because 99% of the garbage type stuff that I dispose of comes from the little garbage bin in the kitchen, lined with an old thin plastic grocery bag. You can’t do that with a reusable bag, nor would you want to, since they’re by definition reusable, unless they’re falling apart.
This whole bag banning thing is so stupid and counterproductive. What we need are biodegradable plastic bags, the continued use and encouragement of reusable bags when appropriate, and the same sense of environmental responsibility that has driven the recycling programs in modern nations. It occurred to me the other day that when I put out the “garbage”, the volume of landfill type garbage is usually less than one-quarter of the volume of recyclables. In fact the non-recyclable garbage is often such a small amount that I sometimes don’t even bother hauling it to the curb until next time. Our recycling bins are huge and an enormous variety of things are now eligible for recycling. Now that’s progress.
Assuming it all actually does get recycled.
There is no guarantee of that, for sure. I can only do the things that I have control over.
We are the local depot for our CSA. They drop off between 4 and 12 reusable plastic boxes on our front porch every Friday. We get a discount on ours based on how many others they deliver.
It’s certainly very convenient for us.
What else can Walmart do for pickup orders? When I would order grocery pickup at Kroger during the pandemic, I’d order the groceries online, then pull up to the store and call them that I’m there. They’d then bring out the groceries, that they’d had been packing for the last hour or so, to my car.
Though I wonder if perhaps they could have a policy that you can return your reusable bag to the store the next time you get a pickup order.
Paper bags.
I’d rather not. I really dislike getting them when Whole Foods give them to me (esp with because the glue on the handles comes off way too easily). And is that actually more environmentally friendly considering the additional amount of tree chopping (esp for a massive retailer like Walmart)? I believe I read somewhere once that it ends up being a push environmentally between paper and plastic.
It probably depends on which environmental issue you’re trying to solve. If it’s reduction of greenhouse gases, then throwaway plastic might be the way to go (compared to cloth or thicker plastic). If it’s keeping microplastics out of the ocean, maybe paper or cloth.
I don’t really know.
Around here, the pickup orders come out in a bunch of large bins, in which the bags were placed. Just cut the bags out of the equation, unless they’re really needed for a large number of small items. But things like bread, milk, cereal, canned goods, and whatnot really don’t need to be in bags.
Hell, most of the time, before they got rid of the plastic bags, each item was being put in its own individual bag. That was just nuts.
I’d imagine people would have a much bigger issue with this and you’d have angry articles about how Walmart is doing malicious compliance, by not placing goods in any bags at all but just dumping groceries in a trunk.
So you can use re-usable bags for garbage, you just don’t want to. Maybe it’s a little inconvenient. Got it.
I don’t think banning disposable plastic bags, by itself, is a solution to anything. And I doubt that anyone foresaw the proliferation of “reusable plastic bags” as a thing that would happen. What the authorities were hoping for (faint hope indeed) was that people would be responsible enough to shop with their own semi-permanent bags all the time. If everyone did that, it would make a huge difference to the amount of plastic in the world, and then perhaps folks could move on to taking other steps towards removing disposable plastics from the product stream. Perhaps we can grant that these laws were well-intentioned but not well-advised as a standalone measure. Unfortunately they were overwhelmed by the tragedy of the commons, where being responsible is always someone else’s problem.