Yorkregion.com - FeaturedNewsSeries1 - Life without plastic?
Life without plastic?
Hmmm...is this going to work? Reporter Teresa Latchford likes the alternatives grocery stores are offering to traditional plastic bags, but found trying to buy a week’s worth of food without plastic packaging was a challenge.
FeaturedNewsSeries1
Aug 01, 2007 10:06 PM
Bring on the canvas, hold the plastic.
The average family of four uses at least 1,000 plastic bags a year and 98 per cent of them end up in landfills, according to Matt Wittek, a spokesperson for Bring Your Own Bag, an organization working to replace plastic grocery bags with reusable canvas bags.
Those plastic bags can sit in the landfill for up to 1,000 years before photodegrading, a process where plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that can find their way to nearby waterways.
Plastic bags are also manufactured by using vast amounts of increasingly expensive oil and the process produces green house gas emission. Those are among the reasons people are beginning to trade in traditional plastic for a more functional, reusable canvas.
One has to applaud the grocery stores for embracing canvas bags.
However, when you get home and begin emptying groceries, have you stopped to examine the packaging?
It doesn’t make much sense to replace plastic bags with canvas if so much of the food is wrapped in plastic.
I was curious to see how difficult it would be to live a week plastic-free when it came to grocery shopping. I vowed to use only canvas bags, buy food and beverages with no plastic wrapping and walk to and from the grocery store to test the canvas bags’ durability.
To resist temptation, I started the week off Old Mother Hubbard style with my cupboards bare. Since I was shopping for one, I figured one canvas bag would do. I had one rolled up under my sink, a housewarming gift forgotten about until now.
The experience turned out to be a foot-in-mouth situation; I had volunteered for the task before realizing my food choices would be severely limited.
On my first trip, I headed for the bakery section knowing I would never find commercial bread not encased in plastic.
I found many fresh breads in paper bags however, all of them had a transparent plastic window. I ended up with some sort of grain bread wrapped in wax paper.
Fresh produce wasn’t a problem, but it became an issue come checkout time as the cashier tried to place the fruit on the scale built into the counter.
Apples kept rolling around, making it difficult to cash out and resulting in a few annoyed glances.
Walking through the isles was discouraging. Pasta in cardboard boxes all had plastic windows, most glass jars such as pasta sauces had plastic lids and yogurt and meat were in plastic, making all my usual choices a no go.
I filled my cart with tinned goodies such as soup, brown beans and tuna (no mayo because of the plastic lid). I discovered I could live off pickles, olives, sauerkraut and other condiments as they came in glass bottles with aluminum lids.
The downfall was products in glass containers were a little more taxing on the wallet.
Frozen foods were out. Many come in cardboard boxes, but I knew there was plastic wrapping inside.
The other option for meat was a butcher, where I could have cuts wrapped in paper, but there wasn’t one nearby that worked with my schedule.
So I came home from my first outing with tuna, fruit, eggs, brown beans, peppers, potatoes, a carton of milk, pancake mix, a loaf of bread, jar of jam and a glass bottle of ketchup.
The canvas bag held everything upright and stood up on its own. But I found out the hard way not to overload the bag as it holds about three grocery bags worth of food and becomes quite heavy.
My only complaint about the bag is the lack of a shoulder strap. The handles eventually dug into my hands.
The second grocery trip took about an hour to walk and produced the same results: fruit, canned goods and vegetables.
I’m not going to lie. I wouldn’t want to do this for more than a week. The problem wasn’t a lack of food, it was a lack of variety.
When the week ended, I had cut my garbage production in half and no longer had plastic bags falling out of my kitchen cupboard every time I opened the door.
But on the flip side, my grocery bill was slightly higher and I didn’t have any bags to line my garbage can, which meant a lot of cleaning.
Having fewer bags to carry up stairs to my apartment made it much easier manoeuvre. So many times before, I have squashed a loaf of bread or banged a carton of eggs off the walls or banister of the narrow staircase.
All-in-all I could survive living plastic free, but food manufacturers make it difficult. As for the canvas bag, I’ll keep using it.
“I believe companies want to do the right thing and consumers are demanding alternatives,” Mr. Wittek said.
Plastic film products, including bags, are not accepted by the blue box program, York Region waste diversion manager Mike Birett explained. Although adding plastic film to the list of acceptable items recycled at a facility in East Gwillimbury has been examined, the cost would be substantial. And it would come out of your pocket.
“It would cost $2 million to retrofit the facility to accept plastic film and after that, it would cost $1.5 million annually to continue to process it,” he added.
“I’ll add whatever people want to the blue box list, but I doubt taxpayers would be happy with the bill.”
Waste diversion in the region would only increase by one per cent if plastic film were added to the list of recyclables. That doesn’t justify the processing price, he continued. That said, All hope is not lost. The region annually examines what other municipalities are doing, does surveys and conducts focus groups on what to do with this type of plastic.
“There are other ways to deal with the plastic film,” Mr. Birett said. “We are looking at the community environmental centres (the first one is to be built in Vaughan) or encouraging retailers to provide take back programs.”
Returned plastic bags back would be stored and bundled with the rest of the store’s plastics to be recycled.
Clean, dry plastic bags are easier to recycle if not contaminated by other material in the blue box, he said.
“But, of course, a good alternative is to use canvas bags,” he added.
Instead of using 20 to 30 traditional plastic bags, you can use four or five canvas bags because of their larger size, Mr. Wittek said. Beyond grocery shopping, he is beginning to see the bags being at picnics, gyms, school and work lunches.
“With all of the colours available, the bags have become a fashion statement for many,” Mr. Wittek explained.