I believe that Cecil missed an important consideration in his answer to “Paper or plastic?” It seems that his reply assumes that the bag ends up in landfill. However, any upward glance in the now-leafless trees reveals that many plastic bags do not ever make it to landfill. Personally, I would like to eliminate this aesthetic urban scourge.
Cecil also states that most people do not bring their own bags. This is true in the states, but not in all other countries. In most European countries, for example, shoppers must pay for any bags they take with them. This policy, plus probably good environmental consciences, leads to most shoppers bringing their own bags. However, these European shoppers also refrain from driving their half-ton suburban assault vehicles four blocks to get groceries. So, it is difficult to imagine what measures would be necessary to entice the bulk of the teeming millions in the U.S. to sacrifice perceived convenience, and behave more responsibly.
I am afraid DrJay hits the nail on the head. Americans love to litter and lay waste. While I easily understand the appeal of plastic bags in certain limited circumstances, for most of my shopping I use five cloth bags. In the years I’ve had them I’ve probably avoided a couple thousand shopping bags, and I try to bring them for other shopping beside groceries. Boy, what a lunatic, I can hear the addicted-to-convenience teeming millions cry. For you, feh. It’s absurdly convenient, especially when avoiding the amoeba effect of plastic bags full of fragile groceries.
I am sure what people find inconvenient is THINKING before tossing around their money, just as they don’t think they have the strength to put the shopping carts back and instead send them toward my car, grumble, grumble… :mad:
Getting people to stop and think is the real problem, when companies have been telling us for years how put upon we are and how they can make life easier for us - everyone from McD’s to laundry soap to breakfast cereal to… :rolleyes: I’m sorry to wake you, but I’m done now.
Welcome to the SDMB! Be sure to include a link to the article you’re talking about.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001222.html
Part one: “Paper or plastic!? I already said I was paying with cash!” --Ed Crankshaft
Part B: A local supermarket chain (Marsh) gives you back 5 cents for each paper bag you bring back for re-use. Do they give you anything for bringing your own canvas bags? Nooooooo!
And in my neighborhood at least, and glance downward in an alley or empty lot reveals many paper bags as well.
I’ll avoid the American-bashing, except to mention that there’s no reason to think that Europeans have more of a conscience. Do y’all honestly think that folks in Europe don’t drive their SUVs to the market out of the goodness of their hearts? Please. They don’t because of money. Cars are expensive, petrol is expensive, groceries are expensive, and as you pointed out, DR Jay, grocery bags are expensive.
As long as people in the US can afford to be wastrels, we will be. That’s been borne out thoughout human history.
BPBob, you can lament all you want, and I’m sure you get warm fuzzies thinking about how good and pure you are, but until it hits people in the pocketbooks, you’re pissing in the wind, I’m afraid. After all, when you say:
you have to remember that it IS their money they’re tossing around.
Fight to change the laws, certainly. Encourage people to reuse and recycle voluntarily, yes. But insults will not convert anyone to your cause.
Andros:
While I generally agree with your last paragraph about laws economic incentive, and the futility of persuading folks by insulting them, I am afraid I have to disagree with your two main points.
First, you claim that “there’s no reason to think that Europeans have more of a[n environmental] conscience”. Come on now, you really mean absolutely no reason? I can find plenty of evidence to support this point. For example, I know plenty of people who can afford cars, but choose not to. Or who have them, but choose not to use them whenever possible. And, I think that it has little to do with “the goodness of their hearts”. Rather it is more like enlightened self interest. They recognize the impact to their quality of life that being dependent on a car has. For more evidence, try reading newspapers in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, etc. You will find plenty of “reason to think that Europeans have more of” an environmental awareness.
For some people, money is not the end-all and be-all motivator.
Secondly, those paper bags in the alley may likely end up in landfill eventually, once the city cleaners come through. I have seen the same plastic bags in the same tree for years. Besides, my point was really more about aesthetics–you are quite right that too many people will litter with whatever you give them.
Finally, to AskNott: Are you offering evidence for BPBob’s claim about thinking? 
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).
Cecil’s column can be found on-line at the link provided by the son of Ares.
moderator, «Comments on Cecil’s Columns»
Those interested in the subject may want to read two threads on this subject in our Great Debates Forum:
DrJay, thank you for your kind words towards the Swiss (amongst whose number I count myself). I do believe that Europeans are more concerned with environmental issues, in great part because (this is my personal observation and may or may not be the true cause) so much more of the environment has disappeared in European countries than in the USA, which still has a great many wide open spaces.
The economic effect must also not be neglected. Example: In Switzerland, you are charged for each bag of trash you leave at the trash pick-up point. (The way this is effected is that you can only leave trash in special, “government-certified” bags that cost much more than a regular plastic bag.) My parents (who still live there) told me that when this policy was implemented in their part of the country, they noticed that people started taking items such as electronic equipment out of their packaging at the store and leaving the packaging in the store dumpster, and very soon stores started cutting down on the amount of packaging provided with their items.
My opinion on cloth bags was already stated in the second thread that I mentioned above, so I won’t expound on the issue too much except to say that in the grocery store I always bring in my own cloth bags.
I used to ride a bike everywhere I went and carried my own bags to the grocery store and, and… all the rest, before I had two kids and a fulltime job.
I also think it would be a good thing if Americans were charged for bags in grocery stores and if gasoline went up about a buck a gallon. That - along with improved public transport in my town - would possibly make me at least try to go back to my old ways.
Say Bob, don’t you work in the defense industry?
Jill
The critical issue in trying to answer a question like “Paper or Plastic?” is what do you want to conserve? Is it energy, non-renewable resources, landfill space, water, air quality? This is what makes the science of Life Cycle Analysis (or Cradle to Grave analysis) so difficult. Often, the answer depends on where you live or manufacture–and those two can be in conflict with one another if you manufacture in one place and dispose of in another.Even if you pick or weight your priorities, it remains complicated. Paper may be a renewable resource, but what about the petroleum product fueling the plant or used in necessary chemical manufacture or in the trucks that deliver the heavier paper bags?
Some years ago a university group did a well-documented study (published in a respected, referred journal, “Science”, I believe)to assess whether paper take out containers were preferable to styrofoam. The resulting storm of well-reasoned letters left no doubt as to the right answer: as Cecil said “it depends.”
Where does that leave the environmentally conscious consumer at the checkout line? The best answer is probably to remember the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order. Use less, reuse what you can, and recycle what you can’t.
I would agree with jonk’s remard about where you live being a determining factor as to which you “should” use.
The debate over grocery bags is similar in nature to the cloth versus disposable diapers dilemma. Out in the arid western US where I live, land is generally cheap and plentiful, while water is generally scarce and potenially expesive. Which is right for us?, disposable diapers for sure (cloth ones need to be washed several times in HOT water, adding to the non-renewable resource drain, not to mention delivery trucks).
However, back east where land is at a premium, but water plentiful, the cloth option may be better for the earth (but you still have to heat the water and deliver, unless you clean them at home, eew!).
As for grocery bags, certainly plastic is less bulky if landfill is your concern. It all depends on what we want future archeaologists to dig up and conclude about us. Canvas bags truly are the best option even if there is no incentive.
Advice: if you are buying only one thing, or were able to get it to the cash register without a bag, you can easlily refuse the bag the cashier is about to put that six-pack in and have them just hand the reciept to you. You are just going to send it all to the landfill eventually anyways.
harrmill
I just can’t believe that Cecil would actually pick up the poop that his neighbor’s dog leaves on his lawn. Is Cecil so sheepish IRL that he would put up with this? 
Diaper services need to follow complicated procedures to wash their diapers. This is because 1) they usually do weekly pick-ups, so they are washing week-old dirty diapers; 2) the diapers are shared among all subscribing families so they have to kill every living thing on them; and 3) they never know which moms/dads will freak and cancel the subscription if there’s a stain on one of the diapers. For those of us who wash at home, on the other hand, a much simpler washing routine does the job. I use flushable rice paper liners to deal with “solids” (you seem to be the squeamish type, harrmill honey, so I’ll stick to euphemisms), but there’s often a bit of “spillover”, so I run the diapers through a prewash with cold water and an enzymatic detergent to break up any “solids”. Then a standard hot water wash with the family’s regular detergent, and finally a cold water rinse with a bit of white vinegar, the secret ingredient for fresh-smelling diapers. This gets them more than clean enough for normal household use.
A Canadian mom and cloth diaper designer once figured out that the amount of water she was using each week to wash her baby’s diapers, about three full laundry loads, was about the same as the amount of water each of her older, housebroken kids were using each week to flush the toilet after use. So if water is so scarce where you live that washing diapers is an unforgivable strain on that resource, maybe you ought to encourage grown-ups to start wearing adult disposable diapers and stop all that wasteful flushing :rolleyes: Or maybe it’s a sign that there’s a deeper ecological problem, namely too many people in an area without the resources to support them, and fretting about your choice of diapers is a red herring.
As for the bag problem, sorry Cecil, but I do weekly grocery shopping for a family of four with canvas bags and I can’t understand for the life of me why it’s “easier said than done”. All I have to do is remember to bring the bags.
The type of plastic bags commonly used in US grocery stores have two major problems: they are small, and they are made of exceptionally cheap, flimsy plastic! The groceries that would comfortably fill one paper sack or one canvas bag would need at least two plastic bags, more if there’s a lot of heavy goods in that order. You can’t consider them to be one-to-one equivalent. Also, because the plastic is so cheap, it wears out very quickly; you can’t count on taking it back to the store for repeated re-uses. The larger, sturdier plastic bags popular in European grocery stores are much more easily comparable to paper sacks. Of course, they cost more, too.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001222.html
When asked the question “paper or plastic?” I know the answer but find the need to assess the asker.
The answer is ‘both’. I re-use plastic to line the bedroom/bathroom trashcans and paper for newspaper and cardboard recycling. I keep on buying canvas bags but they get filled with ‘stuff’. My grocery store gives $.05 refund for each bag brought in, paper, plastic, canvas.
My point here is the answer ‘both’ does not always sit well with the bagger. If they are out of plastic at that station and you say plastic you get the heavy sigh and delay. My store must have tried to tweak this a little. For a few months I was getting the question: “do you have any special bagging requests?”.
Shocked me the first time I heard this, but I got used to it. “Seperate cold from hot, food from non food, double bag frozen,” etc.
Sometimes I think that the wrong answer will result in shoddy bagging technique because you did not choose what the bagger is most comfortable with.
I try to be a good sport. Answers like “Whatever is best for the food”, “What did they teach you in bagging school?” have all been replaced with “Your choice”. Sometimes I get paper, plastic, or both. And I re-use all I get.
As a person working in the print industry specifically for the production of food packaging i feel i should pass on some of my experiences.
Many of the products we produce packaging for are pre- prepared junk foods and are therefore of little value in a “healthy balanced diet”. A large amount of the products we package are luxury snack items such as half a dozen dried ready to eat apricots and the contents actually cost less than the package. Some of the contents actually contain chemical preservatives that are able to leech through the plastic and dissolve the inks(that are sandwiched between two layers of polythene). Many products we package are made by the same companies for different retailers and in better looking packaging sell at vastly higher prices.
As a small UK company we produce tons and tons of this plastic packaging anually as well as 1000’s of tons of our own waste. We are the tip of the iceberg. All our ink and solvents as well as print material are made using petrochemical based products. I have a conscience about my job as i see it as enviromentally disastarous. i would like to hear your views on what i have written.
Dear Zeeper: man, you need a new job! Your company seems to be one of the many that never cease to amaze me in their endless variety of useless and environmentally dangerous offal. People’s endless appetite for convenience/luxury junkfood is what fuels all this, but how to convince them otherwise? I strongly encourage you to follow your conscience. I am sure your skills are marketable.
NOW, back to my critics. :rolleyes: You Teemers and Dopers MUST understand - I have tried to point out the verified facts to my friends and coworkers (without all the flames) regarding the daily choices they make and the incremental damage their habits are doing to their own living space. Most scoff. And the same store I shop in carries the canvas shopping bags!!! Which, incidentally, DOES get me my $.04 discount per bag.
Andros, your point is well taken, more flies with honey, etc., but when I am trying to convince the unwashed masses I am much more flattering and much less flaming! 
I live near Syracuse University, so I often get the trash flying down my street thanks to student tenants with no regard to courtesy OR environment, or the same only bigger from the slumlord’s orangutan cleanup crew throwing everything the tenants left behind into the street. The point being my fuse has been radically shortened over the years on this topic. It has actually gotten the attention of the city fathers, who have changed the trash setout ordinances. (I don’t have an unusually large yard, but I do have an unusually large composting setup, where all of the plant-based waste goes - everyone should do this!!! You can sell the compost after it cooks as organic fertilizer or just use it yourself, your house plants will go nuts! And yes, you can do it in an apartment, you just need a sealing trash can and some instructions. See “Worms Ate My Garbage”, a nice little paperback on composting.)
The final credit goes to jonk for mentioning “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order” because REDUCE is the key. Stop buying throwaway crap! The final tweak is about insults: you have to cooperate in the process to be insulted - if the comment in question is true (but critical of you) then you should recognize it as such and act upon it, correcting your fault; if the statement is false or inapplicable, you may as well ignore it, barring slander.
Happy holidays to everybody!
Just a small comment on the comments made about European vs. USAmerican grocery-bagging patterns. The canvas-bag route is highly effective if, as is the common pattern in European societies, you hit the market every morning or every other morning, to get the stuff for the next meal. If, OTOH, you’re a typical USAmerican suburban householder, you will be attempting to load up on a fortnight’s (or a month’s) 4.5-person supply of every consumable item known to man. So you go for convenience – which is a form of value just as much as monetary expense or environmental impact (you just make an equation of how much of the others it’s worth).
Me, I’m on the “both” side . . . the plastics are my garbage-can liners, the papers are good for the recyc bin. However, I find the paper bags to be more stable when placed on the floor of my car.
jrd
Personally I always use canvas bags, but luckily Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg has settled the ‘paper or plastic’ debate for once and for all:
*
Paper or plastic? Paper! Paper is better for so many reasons it would take three trips just to get them out of the trunk. Try and make an amusing robot mask out of a plastic bag! You can’t! It doesn’t work and you’re likely to end up dead with a wad of plastic in your lungs. Cats don’t climb curiously into plastic bags and then sit there with their tails hanging out. You can’t scribble a phone number or draw a picture of a pony princess on a plastic bag. It’s all about arts and crafts, baby.
*
I disagree. I often buy a bunch of groceries at once. Here’s what I do - I have a large plastic bag (from a clothing store) in my car that’s filled with about six or seven canvas bags (if you need more, get more!) I bring that in the store with me and hand it to the bagger.
Since you can fit more in a canvas bag than a grocery bag, it’s more convenient since it requires less trips from the car to the kitchen when I get home.
I also use the plastic bags for liners in my trash cans at home, but all I need is to forget the canvas bags a couple of times when grocery shopping and I have enough plastic bags to last me for a long time.