A friend of mine recently forgot his reusable bags when he dropped in at Stop & Shop. To make matters worse, he’d also forgotten about Northampton’s new plastic bag ban, which started Jan. 1.
Then the person in line behind him lectured him on the merits of the ban.
“Don’t give me that,” he sputtered to me later. “Paper bags can be just as bad for the environment.”
I favor the ban, but I heard him out. Paper bags, he said, cost more energy and greenhouse gas to make. They consume trees. They’re not as strong, especially if you have to walk a long distance, as many people who don’t own a car must do.
And, he claimed, plastic bags are just as recyclable.
“What’s better, to drive and get a paper bag, or walk and get a plastic one?” he asked.
His arguments stumped me, so I decided to do some poking around. My friend’s a smart guy, so I wasn’t surprised to find him right in some aspects.
Paper bags are no slouch when it comes to environmental harm. Over the whole process of manufacturing, new paper bags require about three times more energy than plastic bags. They therefore emit more climate-change culprits like carbon dioxide. They also require toxic chemicals during paper milling.
Moreover, if they’re landfilled, they are unlikely to biodegrade, since no oxygen, water or light is available to break them down deep under the ground.
But that doesn’t give plastic a get-out-of-jail free card.
Plastic bags tend, first of all, to blow away from landfills and get into gutters, streams and oceans. Not only unsightly, they’re ingested by aquatic and marine life and even by livestock, clogging their digestive systems. Because they’re made from petrochemicals — oil — they contain toxins that can poison animals and humans.
Unlike paper, they don’t biodegrade, even above the ground. Ever. Light exposure breaks them into tiny particles, but those particles are still plastic and just as toxic, if not more so.
Plastic rarely recycled
And perhaps most importantly, although plastic bags can be recycled, they usually are not.
Only 0.6 percent of plastic bags were recycled in 2005, compared to 21 percent of paper bags, according to EPA statistics. And that number may be dropping even further.
“Frankly, they don’t have a lot of value, especially right now because petroleum prices have gone down so far,” said Susan Waite, Northampton’s recycling and solid waste coordinator. With petroleum at $30 a barrel, compared with $120 two years ago, “It becomes very cheap to produce virgin plastic, and the incentive to recycle is very poor.” Not only that, Waite points out, but plastic bags gum up most conventional recycling equipment.
“They clog and choke and wind around the machinery. You can go on tours and see the mess that they make,” she told me. “There’s plastic bags wrapped around all sorts of things.” Communities across the country have been moving toward bans on plastic.
Over 100 counties and municipalities have bans or fees on plastic bags, and the state of California prohibits them.
In Greenfield, voters in a November referendum opted to keep plastic bags, but to ban plastic foam containers used by restaurants for take-out and beverages.
Such efforts take aim at our love affair with all plastic, which consumes an estimated 6 percent of global oil resources. Globally, more than 100 million plastic bags are used each year. And by 2050, plastic trash is on track to represent more mass in the oceans than all the world’s fish combined, according to the World Economic Forum.
I asked Northampton at-large City Councilor Jesse Adams, who wrote the bag- ban ordinance, why he and his colleagues had focused on plastic, without a fee or ban on paper bags.
“Banning both paper and plastic would put a great burden on businesses in Northampton,” he said. “To do away with bags entirely, I don’t know if we’re ready for that.”
For myself, I’ve concluded that the plastic bag ban is one step toward environmental sustainability. But, to borrow a phrase from my mathematician friends, it’s “necessary, but not sufficient.”
BagShare program
One cause for optimism could be found at the Northampton Survival Center on a recent Tuesday afternoon.
There, a gaggle of volunteers were bent over voluminous white canvas malt bags from Williamsburg brewery Opa Opa. Large enough for a sack race, the bags are normally thrown out by Opa Opa at the rate of 300 a week, said Cummington artist Leni Fried.
Fried is the founder of BagShare, a program that creates reusable shopping bags out of waste materials. Some BagShare groups gather for sewing circles, making colorful bags out of scraps of waste cloth.
Others fold the malt bags into sturdy, double-walled totes. They use grommets — small gold rings — to staple the bags’ corners and attach rope handles to the top.
Stores including Serio’s Market in Northampton and the Cummington Old Creamery Co-operative in Cummington have “Take a Bag, Leave a Bag” policies where customers can pick up or drop off a BagShare satchel.
BagShare volunteers have made over 15,000 bags since the program began in 2007, said Fried. The program, which Fried started in Cummington, has caught on in communities as far away as Australia and Cambodia.
“As an artist, this is something I wanted to share, the creativity and ingenuity and making things as a collaboration,” Fried said.
At the Survival Center, the BagShare volunteers were creating bags especially for the nonprofit, which provides low-income residents of the community with food.
Survival Center director Heidi Nortonsmith said she was concerned at first about the nonprofit’s ability to handle the ban. The Center serves 4,700 clients annually, with about 1,000 new recipients each year.
“It’s very difficult for people emotionally and in terms of stigma to come to us,” she said.
We don’t want to put one more thing between them and getting the food they need,” she added. “To the extent that there’s a hardship, we the center want to absorb that.”
Collaborating with BagShare, Nortonsmith said, will allow the center to comply with the ban without requesting a hardship release from the city.
“With a little extra effort and a little bit of grin-and-make-it-work,” she said, “we felt we could really embrace the spirit of the ordinance.”
Recycling and reuse may feel like a recent craze. But remaking old materials into new has a long history, points out Steven Johnson in his historical book on 19th-century London, “The Ghost Map.” There, resourceful individuals salvaged unwanted materials, even finding a use for something as lowly as dog waste — which they sold to tanners who used the material in the leather-curing process.
“Waste recycling is usually assumed to be an invention of the environmental movement, as modern as the blue plastic bags we now fill with detergent bottles and soda cans,” Johnson writes. “But it is an ancient art.”
Meanwhile, here in Northampton the BagShare program — which can be found on Facebook at TheBagShare or at thebagshare.com — needs both volunteers and donations. Just one grommet machine costs $250, Fried said.
At the Survival Center, I noticed that the single grommet machine limited how fast the volunteers could work. We all lined up behind it to staple our folded bags into totes.
We? Oh yes. I tried it too.
By the end of the afternoon, I proudly had two tote bags dangling off my arm.
“Keep them,” encouraged Fried. As a conversation piece, she said, it might send more people their way.
I’ve used them already. They’re spacious and sturdy, light and comfortable to carry. With “Avangard MALZ: Product of Germany” emblazoned on their side in green lettering, they’ve got a fun, upcycled vibe.
And as for keeping them? One’s mine, for sure. But I plan to drop off the second one at a Leave a Bag station soon, and join the ancient community of sharing the remade.•
Naila Moreira is a writer and poet who often focuses on science, nature and the environment. She teaches science writing at Smith College and is the writer in residence at Forbes Library. She’s on Twitter @nailamoreira.
