I hear this at the store all of the time …
Why are stores banning plastic and some stores are banning paper and most stores are urging you to bring your own shopping bags.
I for one do not like the person with their shopping bag on my thread mill grocery store counter top spreading germs from who knows (I could guess) where it is has been.
Where will all of this lead us to say ten years from now? I recognize that it is a problem of our times.
At least in my county, it means they’re trying to cut down on littering. They don’t quite ban the use of their bags, but they do charge an additional 5 cent fee.
Most people who opt out, either carry their item(s), or bring their own bag.
I have no idea where we’ll be in 10 years, but I do think Problem of Our Times is waxing a bit hyperbolic.
I have some reusable bags and I always intend to use them but I often forget and get plastic because it’s useful to have some plastic bags around for various things. Germs from reusable bags? Yeah, I’m not worried.
I find it hard to believe that there are significantly more harmful bacteria on a reusable bag than on people’s hands - hands that touch the counter and the register and the credit card swipey machine and the grocery cart and the produce and the shelves.
But yes, people have tested resuable shopping bags and found significant coliform bacterial counts. So wash your bags. Wash your hands, too, while you’re at it.
I do keep a few bags for meat only when I’m at stores where I bag my own stuff. At other stores, they always put the meat in a plastic bag and wrap it closed before they put it into my reusable bag, so I don’t worry about it too much. Everything else I buy is either going to be washed at home or it’s inside a package anyhow.
I launder my cloth bags. I don’t forget them because I have a system – they never stay in the house, they go right back into the car. Been doing this for 35 years. No big.
Paper AND plastic bags are banned in my county. Well, you can pay extra for paper, no plastic allowed. In five to ten years you probably will only get free plastic grocery bags in the most benighted areas of the country, so you may as well get used to the procedure. My county is on a coastline, and a large number of the plastic ones end up in the ocean. Pacific gyre, look it up.
…and wash unwrapped produce before you eat it. Wash wrapped produce, too, unless it says it has been washed. That’s true no matter whether you carried it home in a paper bag, a plastic bag, your own cloth bag, a cardboard box… The germs won’t kill you, and neither will any residue from pesticides, herbicides, cow poop (hey, I grew up in Amish country), and so on, but still, you probably want to get most of that stuff off.
I use cloth bags. I’ve had them for years, I wash them from time to time, they work for me, and my kitchen doesn’t get overrun with plastic bags.
I’ve been using reusable bags for years. Plastic is not outlawed here yet, but advocates are working on it. It’s really not hard to carry a reusable bag around, I keep a small nylon one in my commuter bag for small or unexpected trips to the drugstore and such, and for groceries or farmers marketing I throw a couple large ones in. Don’t worry, OP, others are just as worried about your stanky unwashed, non-reusing self as you are about their bags.
In the places I’ve lived, paper grocery bags have been almost unheard of since the '80s.
I currently live on the border of two areas: one has a mandatory $0.05 charge for plastic bags and one doesn’t. If we go grocery shopping in the former area, we use our own bags or we load the groceries directly from the shopping cart into the trunk of our car; in the latter area, we get the usual plastic bags.
We reuse our plastic bags for lot’s of stuff. If they start charging or outlaw them, I’ll just buy a roll of them.
The baggers at the grocery store don’t seem to happy with the re-useable bags. They look harder to fill because they don’t stand up on their own like the plastic in the racks do.
There is not a single food item placed on a store conveyer belt that should not be washed prior to eating -
99% of food items are stored wrapped - even the lowly banana has a convenient wrappng - which means that only your hands and the wrapping come into contact with all that deadly ‘germs’ and shit.
Apples - and other fresh fruits - are probably the closest thing to ‘pick and eat’ from the market that you might consider without washing - but I wouldn’t be as worried about the conveyer belt as all those crumb crushing kids (and the adults) that pick thru them constantly.
So - paper or plastic? don’t really care - you’re worried about germs? how about washing your food items prior to eating.
it’s an all depends.
some people like paper because it makes it easier to recycle newspapers in.
some locations don’t like plastic because when empty they are easily blown in the wind and get snagged in tree branches.
if you’re worried about germs your focus should be on children. those little urchins with their hands on the floor and then on everything. people should be required to dump them in the ball pit at the store entrance and fish them out when exiting.
Plastic. It can be used for other things as well. The only use I have for a paper bag is that one of my cats like to sit in them. I tried to get her to sit in a plastic bag, but it didn’t end well.
I’ve always been a bit puzzled about the littering thing. I know that a whole lot of plastic bags end up in places they shouldn’t be. but how? I reuse plastic shopping bags from the store as trash bags, but if I didn’t do that, I would need to buy separate trash bags anyway, and I assume the garbage collecting people don’t just dump them by roadside. It wouldn’t occur to me to just toss around plastic bags out in nature. What’s going on, are people gathering up their plastic bags, driving out to the beach, and dumping them just for kicks?
I’ve seen people leave Walgreens with the single item the register person brainlessly put into a plastic bag, and the customer brainlessly took, and then just drop the bag as they take the single item out on the way to the car.
I re-use the large brown paper bags. I have a collection of about a dozen, which I keep in my car.
Stores don’t like you to double the paper bags. But once you get home with them, they are yours to double as you please. I double them, and I think that makes the doubled bags last more than twice as long as single bags, before they start to fall apart. I get at least 20 re-uses out of them. And they stand up on their own, so you don’t need four hands to fill them.
Here in Alameda county, single-use plastic bags are banned at grocery stores. You either bring your own (non-paper) bag, pay $.1 for a paper bag, or use your hands. They don’t let you re-use paper bags because they can’t be cleaned between uses (ironically, the plastic ones can…).
It doesn’t make sense to me, because you can only carry so many reusable bags, and you usually need more than that if you go grocery shopping. I can’t imagine not getting at least 10 bags if I’m actually shopping for groceries rather than just doing an emergency quick fix.
At least the one place that charges for bags around here lets you bring those same plastic bags back to reuse, instead of it having to be actual non-disposable bags. And still we rarely shop there even though it’s often cheaper. Even their plastic bags take up a lot of room–you can maybe fit one or two in a purse.
I have five cats. Sometimes I go through the bag-it-yourself checkouts and swipe extra plastic bags.
I keep about a dozen cheap (thin, but strong) totesfolded inside a large insulated bag in my trunk. The insulated bag has a zipper, which prevents the totes from falling out and tote-ally taking over my trunk. And if I happen to be getting frozen stuff, the insulated bag is pretty handy, too.
If I’m at the self checkout and they have paper, I use paper. If there’s a bagger who bothers to ask (most don’t, so I usually wind up with plastic anyway) I say paper. I just like paper better, that’s all. However, a few things like milk, ice cream, laundry detergent, those I will put in plastic, just in case of a leak, to contain things. As a child a gallon of milk leaked into the carpet of our family minivan, and that thing STANK for years, so vile I’ll never forget it. Much like that episode of Seinfeld where they couldn’t get the stink out of the car, nothing got that rotten milk smell out.
Screw reuseable or bringing back bags. Bags do get reused, but at home, for collecting garbage, cleaning the kitty litter, etc. If I don’t get more the store, what am I gonna use for that stuff?