In addition to bans, fees, and moral preening, anti-plastic bag advocates have a new trick up their sleeve for inspiring you to bring a reusable tote on your next trip to the grocery store: shame.
Two weeks ago, East West Market, a grocery store in Vancouver, Canada, rolled out a new line of single-use plastic bags for customers who don’t bring bags to the store.
The bags feature less than flattering business names, including “The Colon Care Co-Op,” “Into the Weird Adult Video Emporium,” and “Dr. Toew’s Wart Ointment Wholesale.”
Each bag also features the tagline, “Avoid the shame. Bring a reusable bag.”
“It’s hard to always remember a reusable bag. We redesigned our plastic bags to help you never forget again,” reads the caption to a video announcing the new bags posted to East West Market’s Facebook page.
Given the terrible reputation of plastic bags, and the admittedly clever phony business names displayed on East West Market’s bags, the business’s gambit is earning a lot of positive press, including write-ups in The New York Times and Huffington Post.
The city of Vancouver currently requires businesses to develop strategies for reducing their plastic bag use. It also gives them a menu of policy options for achieving their goals.
They can either cease giving out bags, impose a fee on them, or develop “other mechanisms” that will help them reach a bag reduction target set in consultation with the city.
East West Market has chosen a mix of the last two options. The New York Times reports that the store charges 5 cents for every gag bag carried about by a shame-laden customer.
Like a lot of plastic pollution policies, this one may have backfired. Commenters on the store’s Facebook page seemed more inclined to use plastic bags now that they come with a joke.
“Please, may I buy all three? I promise I will reuse them to tatters,” said one woman. “This just makes me want to use your plastic bags even more, sorry not sorry, this is awesome,” said another.
That might cut against the grocery store’s goals, but the environment will be fine either way.
According to Vancouver’s 2017 litter audit, plastic bags make up only 5 percent of all large litter items, and only 17 percent of those bags were plastic retail or grocery bags.
By comparison, cups made up 20 percent of all large liter items. Candy and snack wrappers made up 7 percent.
The reusable tote bags that East-West Market is pushing can also be terrible for the environment. A number of studies have found that the production of cotton tote bags produces far more emissions than the production of plastic bags.
Regardless, wealthy countries like Canada are responsible for a tiny fraction of marine plastic waste.
Despite their persistent demonization as an environmental menace, plastic grocery and retail bags are generally a small portion of litter, require few resources to produce, and are a super durable and cheap way to hold a bunch of grocery items. We shouldn’t feel bad about that.
Read more at Reason
Silly me, I remember when we switched to plastic bags with the campaign slogan of saving trees.
If there’s one constant in our lives, it’s change.
Ontario banned the burning of garbage years ago. On top of that, it was almost impossible to get a permit for a landfill site. Toronto spent hundreds of millions trucking garbage to Michigan landfills.
Today, it is permissible to burn garbage to generate electricity.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Politicians first had to get out of the way .
Select your goods, take them through the checkout, have them packed and then refuse to pay.
A Chinese SP bookie in Sydney had a famous saying, “money in your pocket yours, money in my pocket mine.
Do remember that liberals make the mistake of thinking everyone else thinks like they do.
It would be fun to get one of those “Adult Video” bags and leave it around the house where my wife would find it.
Plastic bags are fuel . Dumping them in the ground should be banned .
Burn them. Make electricity from it. Call it “Green” power.
I’m sticking my neck out here. There’s a natural opinion that a plastic bag is nothing. I was at the check out counter when the cashier brought out a batch of bags and dropped them with a mighty thud. It was a wake up moment for me, about the way I think about things.
I frequently pick up party balloons on my farm. Latest is a HAPPY FATHER’S DAY . The people who let them fly don’t seem to care where they end up. Set them free??? I don’t know what they’re thinking, or if they think at all.
I wish I could go to that store. I’d buy a thousand and do E-bay. Serious collector items. $5 and they would sell out.
If its not Soda Straws its Plastic Bags then its too much meat consumption or driving too much before long they will reduce us to living like primatives all because of a bunch of Eco-Freaks and their Stupid ideologies
Plastic pollution is a big problem you know. Just the other day I had an activist from the Nature Conservancy try to school me on just how bad it is in our ocean’s. I had just come up from the beach when he started to tell me about it and I responded that I was just at the beach and didn’t see one shred of plastic the whole time I was there. Apparently I was at the wrong ocean?
Vancouver is one of the Cities that actively works to grind the city to a halt .
Heavily underutilized bike lanes ,new traffic lights hatching as fast as chicken eggs, a viaduct built to help the flow of traffic now planned to be ripped down .
A lot of things done right …. 30 – 50 years ago are now under attack .
But hey when you believe you can set the earths thermostat and save the planet through a trace gas then you have self righteousness on your side .
Metro Vancouver has worked diligently for 50 years to run off manufacturing
and done a pretty good job of it . The Air Quality people like to brag about being the most litigious in North America . But if you want another coffee shop well Vancouver is all in .