You may have noticed that beginning around April 2007 there was a wave of reusable shopping bag activity. 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 bag 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.
• Plastic bags don't "biodegrade", they break down into tiny toxic bits which contaminate soil and water. They can take 1,000 years to break down.
• Fourteen million trees were cut in 1999 to produce the ten billion paper grocery bags used by Americans that year.
• 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.

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" has been a timely and well received reminder of the cornucopia of maladies we have levied upon our home planet. There have been others, perhaps beginning with Rachael Carson's "Silent Spring," and there will be many more until we find ways to significantly curb our desires for the needless, the wasteful and the toxic commodities now commonplace in the human culture. The reusable shopping bag 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.

Why All The Fuss Now?

If habits can really be changed by all of the media hype and corporate posturing it will clearly do well and be good for the environment. In general, Europeans are ahead of us in this area and seem to accept the use of their own "containers" for shopping as a rational and sound practice without need of fanfare to get them motivated. It has been common practice at many of the large Italian supermarket chains (Esselunga for example) to charge for each plastic bag. The customer asks for the number of bags they want (if any) when they check out and then bags their own items while the next customer is attended to. Americans probably would resist that process but it is nice to know your bread and vegetables get packed up properly without a litre of soda being thrown on top of them.

Americans are tough customers in many respects. We rely heavily upon the media to inform us of important things and then become cynical after the media “camps out” on the topic too long. The overall issue of environmental protection and resource management needs to become more of a personal matter that is contemplated and acted upon without constant prodding from media, activists, or government. As we come to independent conclusions that not wasting our resources simply makes common sense, perhaps we will stop talking about it and start doing the many small things needed to help solve the bigger problem.

Reusable Bag Shopping Guide

There are quite a few choices available and the selection of the right bag for your needs can make all the difference between finding them to be a nuisance or finding them to be indispensable. That's right, if you have the right bags on hand you just might prefer the whole process using your own bags!

The most important factor that makes a good (and versatile) shopping bag is the design. Not the color or the graphics on the bag but the pattern used to make the bag. We have tested all of the fundamentally different bag designs and can say with confidence that the shape and size of the venerable old paper shopping bag is just about as perfect for general use as it can be. The rectangular shape and overall dimensions of the paper bag has been fine tuned over many years of day to day shopping. There is no point in turning your back on a good thing but where the paper bag fails to be practical is in durability. You pack it full and what happens, it rips open. Someone also got smart and added handles to paper bags but that was even worse, they tear off just looking at them.

However change the material from paper to a durable cloth and stitch on good handles ... now it starts to have the makings of a good shopping bag!

The next most important factor is the handle length. We suggest they be just long enough to carry the bag when full and not an inch more. If the handles are too long, the bag "carries" too close to the ground and actually feels heavier as it swings back and forth in your hand. It is also much harder on the arms and back to lift a bag with longer handles into the car. Handles that are long enough to sling a bag over the shoulder are possibly useful if you have only one bag to deal with. Otherwise, they are a real nuisance.

A choice of the material your bags are made of is also important but to some extent it falls more into a matter of personal taste and preference than practical benefit. However there are cheap bags being sold now at chain store checkout aisles that are made of materials that will not hold up to serious use, especially the rough handling of guys like me who insist that one trip from the car with six bags is better than three trips with two. Among the most durable and environmentally friendly materials in use today, the best materials are 100% cotton canvas and a recycled polypropylene blended fabric. When designing the NotAWaste bags we came down to a choice between these two materials. Recycled polypropylene, which is basically made from soda bottles, is a very suitable material but is considerably more expensive than canvas. We also determined that the durability and weight capacity of a well made canvas bag is more than adequate. If you are seeing a price for a "plastic fibre" bag that is less than a good canvas bag, beware! This is most likely not the best polymer-based material and is probably not recycled either. Canvas has several very important benefits. It is a renewable natural resource, it is strong and durable, it is washable (air drying suggested), and it is 100% biodegradable.

The last factor that may prove to be the most influential is cost. As with everything in life, you really do most often get what you pay for. The bags selling for a buck at the candy aisle are typically too small, are made from low quality material and are most likely to be sewn poorly. Yes, they are better than disposable bags if you can get 10 or more uses from them but when they fail, they too will be in the landfill and, odds are, they will not be biodegradable! You should expect to pay between $8 and $20 per bag (depending upon the quantity purchased and how much of a design statement you want to make) for a durable and well designed product that will make using them seem like a natural part of the process of shopping. In fact, having good bags that carry well, load better and sit better in the car will actually make you regret the times you run to the store without them.

A few last words to stress what you should definitely avoid regardless of cost or clever looks. Bags that are basically two pieces of cloth sewn up around the perimeter to make a bag without real depth are not suitable for shopping. They cannot fit much, are a pain in the neck to load and tend to crush the contents by the very nature of the design. Also, bags that feature cardboard bottoms to make a flat surface when loading are likely to be smaller than the ideal size and the cardboard will simply not last long.