I mean really made me stop in my tracks and just go "wow". And that doesn't happen much at all. However I had to put it out there to share, and as a reminder to myself that every little thing we do can somewhat help leave less of a footprint on this planet.
I will be purchasing some of these bags. I can assure you that with 5 children I have contributed my fair share to the landfills through the use of items with names like Huggies and Pampers. I can also assure you that many times the huggy or pamper was in a plastic baggie.
Now that we are at the phase of "oh please God let it be true done with diapers" area of our lives I think that I might also be able to lessen my consumption of plastic bags.
Read on. Be astounded. 14 Billion....yes 14.
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Plastic bags still dominate Boerne shopping scene
by Elena Tucker - Staff Writer
Locally, H-E-B offers alternatives for environmentally conscious
San Francisco banned common plastic grocery bags in March 2007, and one year ago H-E-B began marketing a new reusable canvas tote, but in the Texas Hill Country, plastic is by far the carrier of choice if simple observation of customers is an accurate gauge.
In December of 2006, H-E-B initiated a pilot program in the form of canvas bags that sell for $3.97. By April 2007, the company claimed to have sold more than 8,000 bags.
Although the bags are displayed gift-like throughout the Boerne location, and despite the statement by one store manager that some customers religiously bring in their own cloth bags, on a busy January morning, no grocery shoppers were seen to be packing reusable canvas totes.
Robert Bateman, president of plastic bag-producing Roplast Industries explained in a National Geographic interview that standard plastic grocery sacks sells for about one cent.
“The plastic bags are so inexpensive that in the stores no one treats them as worth anything … they use two, three or four when one would do just as well,” he said, noting that plastic bags “are becoming a victim of their success.”
H-E-B stated in a San Antonio Express-News article last year, that two years of more careful bagging had saved plastic bag usage by 136 million pieces.
But the effectiveness of such a significant-sounding reduction may be questionable.
Austin City Councilman Lee Leffingwell, in pushing for plastic bag restrictions in his own city, estimated that San Antonio probably buries more than 1,000 tons of plastic bags each year in its landfill.
Environmental journalist, Larry West, believes that anywhere from 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags a year are used and tossed out around the globe.
Those numbers translate into more than one million plastic bags each minute.
Whole Foods Market publishes a statistic that is four times higher.
What bags don’t end up in landfills — or littering urban and rural landscapes — show up in the ocean to the tune of about 46,000 pieces of plastic for every square mile of ocean. Plastic bags, adds the Whole Foods Web site are responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of marine animals each year, and, said David Barnes of the British Antarctic Survey, plastic bags are now seen “almost everywhere” in Antarctica.
As environmental issues come again to the forefront, and as 2008 gets underway, consumers, politicians, and experts continue to debate the virtues of single-use polyethylene bags versus corn- or soy-based “plastics” versus paper.
However, there is no debating that the practice of toting groceries in reusable, normally canvas, bags, is far and away the most economically and environmentally sound choice.
Last year was the 30-year anniversary of grocery store plastic sacks. It might have been one of those birthdays that H-E-B - along with other reusable tote advocates - would have preferred not to celebrate.
Other points of grocery bag interest according to Whole Foods Market:
* Number of plastic shopping bags used each year, in the US alone: 14 billion.
* Percentage of plastic bags returned for recycling: 1 percent.
* Annual cost to US retailers for giving away “free” bags: $4 billion.
* Barrels of oil required for US annual plastic bag consumption: 12 million.
* Number of trees cut down for paper bag consumption, in the US: 14 million.
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