If you’re old enough to have been grocery shopping in 1977 when the first plastic bags were introduced in grocery stores, that bag you carried your goods home in is likely still intact. It’s probably in a landfill where it won’t completely decompose for another 955 years. The bag had a useful life of about 15 minutes–from the store to your car to your house. That is, a plastic bag is useful for 0.000003 percent of its existence.
If you went to the landfill today and picked out your circa 1977 plastic bag, it would probably look almost new. Maybe you could give it a shake and reuse it. But first, you will have to dig past the millions and billions of other plastic bags that have been added to the landfill over the last 45 years. Walmart alone distributes 20 billion plastic bags a year in the US. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the average American family takes home about 1,500 plastic shopping bags a year. They pile up!
Plastic bags are cheap to produce. At about a penny apiece, they are the cost of doing business, and stores roll the price they pay for plastic bags into what we pay for the items we buy. From there, the costs of those “free” bags start to escalate.
What do you do with them after you’ve emptied the bags?
Well, maybe you reuse them. Maybe you line your bathroom trash receptacle with a bag, store your yarn in one, or use them for carrying out the kitty litter. Perhaps you’re a crafty person, and you make one of those clever floor mats with a few dozen of them. But statistics show that you are throwing them out.
You could recycle them. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimate states that we only recycle 12 percent of our plastic bags at best. Other sources say less. But the Town of Easton, like many other communities, does not accept plastic bags for recycling. Yet, plenty of bags still end up in our town’s recycling bins. From there, they go to the recycling facility, where pickers struggle to pull the bags out of the stream so they don’t end up jamming the sorting equipment down the line. This is a huge problem. The cost of labor and downtime filter into increased costs of recycling services. How much? It’s hard to put a dollar amount to it. A Talbot County official said, “In general, recycling and solid waste is a pass-through cost. As companies providing solid waste and recycling services experience increases in costs, they pass along these increases to the local government they serve. It is very difficult to provide a percentage of the total cost or savings that are associated with recycling.”
An article from the Chicago Tribune gives us some idea of costs to recyclers. It describes the problem plastic bags pose at a Waste Management recycling facility in South Chicago and includes a video showing workers retrieving bag after bag as material streams by on the conveyors. It also shows a worker scraping away at a plastic bag jam in the maw of the sorting equipment.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-plastic-bag-ban-recycling-0731-biz-20150730-story.html
(The photo is a screenshot from the Chicago Tribune video)
According to the article, “Each day, more than five hours are spent cutting away materials from the (equipment] shafts, mostly plastic bags. Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, [the Waste Management director] estimates that it costs an additional $9,500 a month in labor.”
The cost of a “free” plastic bag can add up!
Your plastic bags don’t belong in your town recycling bin, although you can probably recycle them where you get them. Grocery stores provide bins at store entries for collecting plastic bags, and some retailers send those bags to a facility that makes decking and railing products like Trex. Others, somewhat ironically, send the bags for recycling into reusable bags. According to company and Trex websites, Giant, Harris Teeter, and Weis collect plastic bags to send to Trex. (Note that some sites have temporarily suspended bag collection due to Covid. Ask about recycling at your store.) But, and this is important, make sure you only recycle clean bags. If a dirty or wet bag gets into a bin or if trash gets into the bin at your store, it contaminates the bin’s contents. All of the bags will be thrown out.
Putting your plastic bags into those grocery store bins is the right way—the only way—to recycle them. But if we only recycle 12 percent of them at most, almost 9 out of 10 of the bags pile up in landfills and, even worse, escape into our landscape and waterways. They are an environmental disaster.
So what can we do? The answer is fairly easy: Get yourself some reusable bags, and then start using them.
Marion O Arnold – Plastic-Free Easton
Easton
Thomas kicklighter says
Grateful for your time and effort on this subject.
Time to eliminate the use of plastic bags.
Marion O Arnold says
Thank you! Plastic-Free Easton ultimately would like the Town of Easton to consider requiring businesses to charge for bags. When customers have to pay for bags, they bring their own! We encourage our fellow citizens to discuss this option with your council representatives.
Rose Sigman says
It amazes me that with our ingenuity and know how that someone has not/can not develop a bio-degradable plastic that can be used for bags, bottles, etc.
Marion O Arnold says
That might happen someday. But until then, we’ll have to live by “reduce, reuse, recycle”!
Deirdre LaMotte says
There are biodegradable bags that our Natural Food store uses for produce. They are expensive and I do
agree, have everything compostable.
Marion O Arnold says
Truly biodegradable bags would make our world a better place indeed! That’s in the future. We can make an impact right now. Keep reusable bags in the car and take them into the store and use them every time. Instead of taking home 1500 plastic bags a year, use the same reusable bags 52 weeks out of the year. That’s a low-tech something we can all do.
Jane Bollman says
Glad to see this very valuable letter in the Spy.
John Dean says
Thank you for an informative, useful article. I agree with you on the plastic bags–an ecological disaster.
Ruth Perry says
Remedy for remembering to use your own non-plastic bag: After unloading your groceries (or whatever), hang the bag on the door leading outside to your car, take it to your car on your first trip to use your car, and it will always be in the car when needed. Or better still, always have two or more stored in car.
Susan Anne Olsen says
What a great LTE, Marion! Our Sierra Club Lower Eastern Shore Group has been raving about it and sending it around.
Thanks!
Susan Olsen, Vice Chair
Sierra Club, Lower Eastern Shore Group