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You may have noticed that beginning around April 2007 there was a wave of activity with reusable shopping bags. Mostly this was directed towards encouraging people to start using reusable grocery bags. That is where the average person consumes the most paper or plastic shopping bags. Why all of the sudden media buzz? Is it marketing hype, reactionary environmentalism or a meaningful campaign? And, assuming you find the premise for using them to be sound, we will provide a brief reusable bags shopping guide to help you make a wise purchase.

Is It All Just Hype?

The statistics related to the consumption of plastic and paper shopping bags are nothing short of terribly alarming. Here are just a few: Americans consume 100 billion plastic shopping bags every year. Over 500 billion are consumed worldwide and about 4 billion become general litter. It’s imperitive that we make a move to reusable shopping bags. Each ton of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatts of energy and 7,000 gallons of water.

Based upon our own calculations (all types of shopping without using reusable bags) it is likely that you use more than 2,000 paper and plastic shopping bags a year for each member of your family. Consider the volume of space that this might require if you had to put all of the disposable shopping bags you acquired into a closet. For a family of four, it wouldn’t take long to need a bigger storage room. The fact is that none of this material is required to make life better or more enjoyable. Quite the opposite, it all goes to a recycling station or simply to a landfill where ultimately someone, our children or theirs at the latest, will find the consequences very disturbing.

It has become a common misconception that simply “recycling” our garbage is a sufficient response to the negative environmental impact we are having on our planet. It is much more important to eliminate things that we don’t need first! Avoiding needless waste is far better than recycling though recycling is obviously much better than indiscriminate dumping. The buzz about reusable shopping bags is definitely a worthwhile campaign to reduce needless waste. It is a simple change of habit where everyone can have a meaningful impact … one small needless shopping bag at a time.  The reusable shopping bags buzz is definitely a significant and reasonable undertaking. The production and disposal of plastic and paper bags touches upon all facets of what we are doing wrong. The raw materials, be they pulpwood or petroleum, are better reserved for other uses. The production of disposable bags creates unnecessary pollution and wastes additional energy resources. And what we have at the end of these short life cycle commodities is a great big pile of waste that needs to be dealt with.

Reusable shopping bags cannot eliminate all of the waste and energy consumption but they are vastly more efficient.

The sudden flurry of promotion for reusable bags is very simple. On one hand, there are realities being dealt with as land fills are simply filling up too fast. Many municipalities in the USA and abroad are grappling with possible legislation to ban plastic shopping bags. On the other hand, corporate public relations and marketing folks have obviously decided to get on the “right” side of this issue before being compelled or penalized.