bag the bags

From the AP's Stephen Manning in the C-J...

The inevitable question faced by shoppers at the grocery checkout, how to tote their food home, may soon get simpler.

Faced with a growing push in some states and cities to ban or limit use of plastic bags, many grocers are encouraging consumers to recycle bags or bring their own. At least one, Whole Foods Market, is doing away with the bags altogether.

We do about half of our shopping at Aldi's. To cart away one's groceries, they encourage the use of the store's boxes-- and they sell paper and sturdy plastic bags. (They also use a $.25 deposit device attached to their carts to encourage a culture where people take care of their baskarts.) Those are cost-saving and environmentally-friendly strategies.

But many grocers report that about 90 percent of their shoppers still ask for plastic. And the bag-makers, a billion-dollar industry, oppose bans, calling instead for consumers to reuse or recycle. They favor recent legislation that encourages the recycling of bags but doesn't ban them outright....

Some states and municipalities have tried to curb the use of the bags or keep them from becoming litter. New York's City Council passed a law this month requiring stores to collect and recycle bags, following a similar law in California.

Last year, San Francisco adopted the nation's first bag ban, which took effect in November. The only plastic bags now allowed at large grocers are made of compostable material. Similar regulations are being considered by cities nationally, though proposals in Baltimore and Annapolis, Md., foundered last year.

The United States lags behind many other countries globally in placing limits on plastic bags. Ireland and Germany levy fees for every bag handed out by stores, and several African nations have set thickness requirements that have effectively banned the flimsy bags that float in the air. Earlier this month, China, the world's fastest-growing economy, banned free plastic shopping bags and encouraged people to use cloth ones....

Plastic bags, used widely since the 1970s, are a favorite of grocers because of their price, around 2 cents per bag compared to 5 cents for paper. Environmentalists estimate between 500 billion to a trillion bags are produced annually worldwide. Made from fossil fuel-based polymers, the bags are virtually indestructible, taking years to break down....

The plastics industry argues that the shift to paper is actually worse for the environment. To make paper bags, trees must be cut down. And it takes seven fuel-burning trucks to ship paper bags to retailers compared to just one for the same amount of plastic bags, according to the Plastics Division of the industry group American Chemistry Council.