Ditch the Plastic: Bags

This is Part III of a three-part series; click here for Part I and Part II.

Here we are, Part 3 of Ditch the Plastic!

So to recap: by now you've weeded most of the plastic bottles and plastic cutlery out of your life. Hopefully you've settled with a reusable, non-disposable option for meal times and beverages. Now, we're going to move on to an even more difficult plastic offender...

The plastic bag.

By 'plastic bag', I'm not just referring to the ubiquitous shopping tote - I'm also talking about sandwich baggies, trash bags, and food packaging. Much more difficult to eliminate, isn't it?

The type of plastic that comprises these items is sometimes called 'film'. It's especially thin and flexible, which makes it great for carrying and holding things. Unfortunately, this type of plastic is also not recyclable through your household recycling program - in fact, recycling centers treat it as a contaminant because it wraps around machinery and gums up the recycling process. As a result, most of this thin, clingy plastic ends up in landfills or in the wild, where it wreaks havoc:

Americans use about 100 billion plastic shopping bags per year (link). Each of those bags is used for an average of 12 minutes, and takes 500+ years to degrade into microplastics in a landfill. Think about that: for 12 minutes of convenience, you're putting non-degradable waste into the system for over 500 years!

Now, in some cities it is possible to recycle plastic bags at special collection sites (click here to find yours). But it takes a lot of effort to remember to collect them, bring them to the facility, etc. Because of that, only 1% of plastic bags actually make it to the recycling center.

Ok, you may say, but isn't this getting better? Aren't many countries banning plastic bags? It's true that plastic shopping bags are becoming passé as more and more countries enact bans (see Europe, the U.S., Thailand). These measures may help curb the use of plastic shopping bags. But further studies are showing that plastic bag bans aren't always effective. This is because while they make the bag itself illegal, they don't change the human behaviors that necessitate plastic bags in the first place. As a result, people seek out plastic substitutes to solve the problems. This was recently studied in the U.S., where bag bans in California led to a corresponding uptick in sales of trash bags (listen to this Planet Money episode for more).

What To Do:

I could give you an easy answer for solving this problem. I could tell you to get a reusable tote bag, or wrap all your sandwiches in beeswax wrap. These solutions would help, and if you're not practicing these behaviors, you should definitely start. But they're only a small part of the story, and an incomplete one at that.

The truth, the real way to solve this, is much, much bigger.

To start, watch this oldie but goodie to set the stage. Some of the stats may now be out of date, and you may not agree with the political undercurrents, but suspend your judgment just a beat to grasp the overall message, friends (and especially stick around for the golden arrow at 11:45):

Here is the truth that is at the root of our plastic bag problem: we are habituated to consuming, not sustaining. In understanding the deep difference between these two actions, it's helpful to consider their definitions:

Consume (v.): to do away with completely; to spend wastefully; to use up; to eat or drink especially in great quantity; to devour or destroy; to use as a customer

Sustain: (v.) to give support or relief to; to keep up or prolong; (adj.) to maintain at length without interruption or weakening

Our default mode is to buy things, use them up, and throw them away. It's the way our industrialized world is organized, the way we're marketed to, the way we measure each other's worth. The problem is that this unnatural idea is at fundamental odds with our natural world. And it's about time that we started to change it.

The only way to truly solve your plastic bag problem (and most waste problems), is to change your habits from consuming to sustaining. It's only by consuming less and reusing more that we can reduce the plastic we use to shop with and dispose of our trash. This is a very difficult thing to do. It means disengaging from marketing; it means being "out of fashion". It means rearranging your spending habits and reevaluating where you buy things from. It means that you have to change your behaviors.

Not the easy answer you wanted to hear, right?

Nope, not easy. But here's the thing, friends: changing little habits helps, but if that's all we ever do, we'll only be changing out cogs in the same unnatural machine. In order to truly solve this problem, we have to re-evaluate the whole machine.

So that is the question I want to leave you with, on this Part 3 of Ditch the Plastic: How do you begin to change your behaviors, and in doing so, change the machine?