Going Green at the Grocery Store

Plastic or paper?

That’s what some stores were asking in the eighties. It was a time when the environmental movement was getting positive media coverage – instead of being linked to free-loving, unemployable, drug-using hippies as they were in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Times have changed – but the environment is still in the media’s golden eye.

These days, instead of plastic or paper, it’s cloth. Recently I went grocery shopping, and instead of letting the grocery clerk just put everything into plastic bags, I purchased several cloth bags.

The cloth bags cost me $1.99 each, and they have the grocery store’s corporate logo smeared all over it – but hey every bit helps the environment.

And it saves space. For years I’ve been storing plastic bags in my linen closet. My linen closet constantly overflows, to the point where I end up throwing out a lot of those plastic bags.

Instead of wasting plastic bags, I’ll bring with me the cloth grocery store bags.

They are nice bags, and they provide better protection of my new purchases than plastic, and far better protection than paper.

Paper bags get wet, and break. Plastic bags stretch and rip. Cloth bags – well so far they stand up to the pressures of my massive grocery shopping sprees.

Cloth shopping bags are good for the environment, great for me, and provide some free advertising for the store. It is a win-win situation. And a green one at that.

One day, maybe they won’t charge for the cloth bags – maybe they’ll charge for the use of plastic or paper bags? Then we’ll have moved forward.