Letters to the Editor
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Funny...
I took WF's position as "Please DON'T use any bag other than a reusable one (and here's some we'll sell you), but if you HAVE to paper is the least - but still non-trivial - evil".
Personally, the idea of needing to often wash a cloth bag that just has other containers in it is silly. I think I've washed mine 3-4 times in the 4 years I've had it - on cold, with other stuff, and then line dried. What, I'm going to be bothered by a stiff or wrinkled bag?
If I need paper for recycling, I'll pick a day it isn't raining and have 1 (one) to spare. I get other perfectly fine plastic bags from other sources like a local bagel place that sells their half dozens in them. I still get more than I need and have to regularly retire them to the fairly new plastic bag recycling center.
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Whole Foods Is Just Doing This To Cut Costs
With rising oil prices, plastic bags cost more than paper ones. That's the only reason they're doing this.
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@Asher Steinberg
Whole Foods Is Just Doing This To Cut Costs
With rising oil prices, plastic bags cost more than paper ones. That's the only reason they're doing this.
I'm not sure that's accurate. Whether paper is in fact less expensive (and I have my doubts, though Whole Food does use deluxe plastic bags, so maybe). Since I've been going to Whole Foods they have had a policy of crediting you ten cents if you use your own bag. Clearly this sort of thing isn't just to cut cost (not to mention Whole Foods is hardly a model of cost cutting).
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Trader Joe's only has paper bags
Good paper bags with strong handles. Easy to recycle because useful and usable.
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Plastic bags are not our biggest problem
I may not agree with all the arguments in this particular article, but are bag bans really the great green hope they're cracked up to be? I'm not saying plastic bags are great - I'd like to see them all replaced with biodegradable plastic anyway - but most of the people I talk to reuse or recycle them. I volunteer at an animal shelter and we rely on donated plastic grocery bags.
And as for the Ireland example, the converse statistic from that experiment is that sales of plastic bags went up by 400% after the ban. So yeah, people started using cloth bags...to bring home their boxes of plastic bags. Plastics were still going to the landfill, and people on fixed incomes had one more additional cost. If Whole Foods really wanted to be green, they'd start selling their products in compostable packaging, or doing something about plastic bottles and bottlecaps, which comprise a much greater percentage of plastic waste. Going after the plastic bags seems like taking the easy way out - and taking a way that will actually negatively impact some shoppers.
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hard to take this post seriously
Not a word of comparison of the environmental impact of paper bags vs plastic.
a certain wacky organiation is pro-plastic, so it MUST be bad? If GW Bush comes out against drug abuse, will Salon run a pro-heroin column?
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I'm looking forward...
...to a time when grocery stores stop supplying any bags whatsoever. I'm more than happy to bring my reusable bags to whatever store I happen to be shopping at. I have bags from two different stores and I'll be damned if a few dirty looks are going to deter me from using the P&C bags at Wegmans and vice versa. Honestly.
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Soapboxing.....
Clearly Jeff Stier's is a Republican.... or he should be. His rhetorical style is anyway.
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Whelan is a chemical company whore from way back
She made her reputation 30 years ago attacking the Love Canal mothers, who had suffered miscarriages and devastating birth defects in their children, as "hysterical housewives."
She also told them that if they smoked - as most of them did - their tragedies were their own fault.
She was so vicious in her defense of the chemical companies - even more than her attacks on the tobacco companies - that she persuaded more than a few environmentalists that if she was against it, smoking couldn't be all that bad.
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You people crack me up.
Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good - or at least pretending to. Are you the same people who tried to convince me that cloth diapers were WORSE for the environment than disposables? If not, you might as well be. And even if we accept at face value that the DDT ban caused millions of malaria deaths (even though we know that's a lie) AND that replacing millions of plastic bags with a much smaller number of paper ones will lead to an increase in roach births (highly questionable, as I'm sure there are some built-in limitations on roach populations), AND that increased roach populations will increase the asthma problems of poor urban children whose parents shop at Whole Foods and are now forced - FORCED, I tell you! - to carry their artisan cheeses home in paper bags because they are worried that washing their cloth bags might cause environmental devastation ... even if we swallow all those ridiculous premises whole - is he really comparing asthma to malaria?
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encouraging bag reuse
Whole Foods has been trying to reduce waste generated by plastic bags for quite a while now. They've had a long standing policy to give a $0.05 credit per bag reused by each consumer, have tried using thicker plastic bags to encourage reuse, and offered reusable cloth or durable plastic totes. They currently have a policy to replace their totes made from recycled plastic in the event they get a hole or tear in them. And at my local store there is often a reusable bag give-away if you make a purchase over a specific amount. As a very minor Whole Foods shareholder, I've been really happy with their bag policies. I currently have 2 of their new bags, neither of which I had to pay for, 1 insulated bag that they gave me about a year ago during a promotion, and about 4 other fabric bags I've been given from other sources, again without me paying for them. These plus the leftover thin plastic bags I've accumulated over the years are more than enough to bag all my groceries.
Which is all great. Even in trying to reuse bags as much as possible, and refusing them from stores when I'm buying one or two items that I can carry I still end up with piles of these things. They end up in the bag recycling bins at Whole Foods.