♥How often do you forget to take your reusable bags to the grocery store? How often to you purchase more than your bags will hold?

I have to admit that on more than one, two, ten…heck…20 occasions, I have forgotten my bags. Either in the car…or still at home. We drive almost 40 miles to do any major grocery shopping, so going back home is rarely an option. I have, however, trekked back to the car to retrieve my multi-colored, eclectic managerie of bags. I also admit, bringing home twice as many plastic bags as I have recycled bags from our major shopping trips.

The other day, I came across this article in the Wall Street Journal…thus the title for this post.

An Inconvenient Bag… the green giveaway of the moment–the reusable shopping bag– is a case study in how tricky it is to make products environmentally friendly. 

It’s manufactured in China, shipped thousands of miles overseas, made with plastic and could take years to decompose. It’s also the hot “green” giveaway of the moment: the reusable shopping bag.

The bags usually are printed with environmental slogans as well as corporate logos and pitched as earth-friendly substitutes for the billions of disposable plastic bags that wind up in landfills every year. Home Depot distributed 500,000 free reusable shopping bags last April on Earth Day, and Wal-Mart gave away one million. One line of bags features tags that read, “Saving the World One Bag at a Time.”

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But well-meaning companies and consumers are finding that shopping bags, like biofuels, are another area where it’s complicated to go green. “If you don’t reuse them, you’re actually worse off by taking one of them,” says Bob Lilienfeld, author of the Use Less Stuff Report, an online newsletter about waste prevention. And because many of the bags are made from heavier material, they’re also likely to sit longer in landfills than their thinner, disposable cousins, according to Ned Thomas, who heads the department of material science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Some, such as the ones sold in Gristedes stores in New York that are printed with the slogan “I used to be a plastic bag,” are misleading. Those bags are also made in China from nonwoven polypropylene and have no recycled content. Stanley Joffe, president of Earthwise Bag Co., the Commerce, Calif., company that designed the bags, says the slogan is meant to point out that the bag itself is reusable, taking the place of a disposable plastic bag.

Some plastic bags are, in fact, made with recycled materials. The polypropylene bags at Staples are made from 30% recycled content, according to company spokesman Mike Black. Target sells six types of bags, including a $5.99 variety made from recycled plastic bags, says spokesman Steve Linders.

And yesterday, at the Clinton Global Initiative, a public-policy gathering in New York of business and political leaders, Wal-Mart pledged to reduce plastic bag waste by about 33% in every store world-wide in the next five years. Starting next month, the company will sell a new blue reusable plastic bag with a small amount of recycled material for 50 cents, half the price of its current black bag, which is 85% recycled plastic, says spokeswoman Shannon Frederick.

Getting people to actually use the bags is another matter. Maximizing their benefits requires changing deeply ingrained behavior, like getting used to taking 30-second showers to lower one’s energy and water use. At present, many of the bags go unused — remaining stashed instead in consumers’ closets or in the trunks of their cars. Earlier this year, KPIX in San Francisco polled 500 of its television viewers and found that more than half — 58% — said they almost never take reusable cloth shopping bags to the grocery store.

Grab That Tote, Use That Bag

Tips for getting into the habit of reusing the reusables:

1. 1. Leave bags by the front door or in the trunk of your car and dangle a reminder from your key chain or the rearview mirror to grab them.
2. 2. Put a reminder on your grocery list and make part of the kids’ allowance hinge on whether they told you to bring the bags that week.
3. 3. When stuck in the checkout line without a reusable bag, choose paper or plastic based on the one you think you’ll reuse the most.

♥This is such a great article, that I hope you will read it in its entirety here.

In the spirit of fun, I thought I would share a photo of a bit of my reusable bag collection. The very last of the article quotes a woman talking about not using certain bags for certain grocery items, such as dripping chicken containers. Do you have a favorite that you treat differently than the others in your collection? I know I do! Do you have one that is more practical than others?

My favorites are my Mount Rushmore and the purple Co-Op bags..which both came from very memorable trips. The Home Depot bag and Sam’s insulated bags are ones that I would recommend to everyone who asks. You cannot tell it by the photo, but that HD bag is HU-U-UGE! It expands and has a sturdy clip and reinforced bars in the top of the bag. I even use it to take my Ebay packages/boxes to the post office.  The insulated bag from Sam’s was a giveaway for signing up for something…I don’t remember…but it is great to get those frozen items home when its 103 degrees outside.

 

 So, show us your favorite bag! Link back to your post in the comments or contact me so that I can post your photo here and include a link to your blog. I think this might be FUN!  ♥ 

One of the things I do not like about how blogs work is that the last post is always first. So what do you do if you are trying to tell a story in chronological order? Do you go back and add to the start? That would mean a change of titles. If you are just now stopping in, this is a continuation of our trip to OKC on Saturday.

 So, we have made that turn off of I40 headed to Geary, but first we have to drive through the Cherokee Trading Post to see the buffalo and then through the KOA Campground to see the new improvements. Again, I dream about an RV lifestyle that might not happen.

Less than 1/8 of a mile down the road is a favorite stopping place of ours, the Sand Hill Vineyard. The past few times we passed by it was after hours, so we intentionally made a huge effort to get there before closing. We met the owners, Gloria and Roger Woolery, the first time we ventured into the tasting room. Wine tasting is not something we do on a regular basis, but we were intrigued by the location… which appears to be set inside some kind of pipeline or oil field supply company and the metal building set as a tasting room. The setting  was a just bit different than any other vineyard we had visited, making us more fascinated with curiosity. I can count the amount of times I have visited a different winery on both hands, so this isn’t actually saying much.

Gloria and Roger are very colorful, lively people whom made us feel at home inside the lovely interior of the building. I found my favorite wine to be Muscat, a deliciously fruity dessert wine and purchased a couple of bottles along with a nice bottle of Zinfandel.

When we visited on Saturday, we were at first disappointed to not see Gloria and Roger’s familiar faces, but soon felt at home visiting with Katy Snyder, our wine tasting host. Katy and her husband, Andrew, are the actual winemakers of the Sand Hill label.  Katy is one of those people that you just know ALWAYS has a smile on her face.

We tasted several of the wines, beginning with that favorite Muscat, and ending with Da Zinci Chocolate Port-Style Wine. Katy caught MY attention with the promise of a chocolate aftertaste, but unfortunately DH was the only one that actually tasted that hint of chocolate. I can’t say that I have ever tried Port and have nothing to which to compare,  but I did find this very rich, thick and  flavorful.  I have been told that Port wine pairs perfectly with chocolate, making the combination of the two deliciously good, so corking the two flavors in one bottle seems like a pretty great idea to me. 

Our adventure ended with a purchase and an introduction to the Snyder’s young daughter, Mulan, who offered many precious smiles as we visited.  The only way this experience could have been any better would have been for us to meet Andrew, the winemaker himself.

If you are ever in the area of Geary or Calumet, Oklahoma, please stop in for a visit at Sand Hill Vineyards. You will not be disappointed.