Paper or Plastic?

We hear that or a variation of that each time we go to the grocery stores. In the book referenced below, "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save The Earth", #5 is about New Ingredients. According to the book, "If just 25% of American homes used 10 fewer plastic bags a month, we'd save over 2.5 BILLION bags a year."

We have all seen the new wave of "recycled plastic bags". Commercially suggestive guilt indicators, you need to buy these to be "green". Each grocery store, super store, even the bulk stores have them (they're bigger too!). Usually sells for about $1 each.

If you are fortunate you can obtain a few of them at shows or conferences. In a few weeks time, we Frugals collected about 10 of them. We have some in each of our vehicles and try our best to use them each time we go to the store. We do get some plastic bags when we need to get just one item, but we recycle them here at home as trash bags.

One of the tags on a washable nylon bag we obtained (yes, nylon is petroleum based), states by using these bags, "..can save the average American 300 to 700 plastic shopping bags per year, which will save 3 to 7 gallons of crude oil." That means each of our households can contribute significantly to not only the manufacturing of these bags, but prevent them from entering into the wastestream and not decompose at all!

Putting it on a larger scale, there are 300 Million people in the US. (I know Nancy Pelosi said we were losing 500 Million jobs a month, you do the math or was it the work of alarmist speech writers?) If 100,000 frugals used the bags regularly for a year, there would be a savings of over 5.4 Million gallons of gas. How many gallons of gas do you use each year? Figure it out and leave me a comment. We estimate, our current usage in the Frugal household with three vehicles and a motorcycle to be about 2500 gallons a year. That's a figure we are going to work on in 2009.

It's not that hard to use the bags, the hardest part is remembering to bring them into the store when you get there. If you are packing the bags yourself, it may take some practice, but you can do it. Stick the frozens groceries together, boxes in another and fruit in another, you'll figure it out and hopefully won't crack some eggs in the process.

Enjoy the read and leave a comment or two as Herr Frugalmeister continues to shape this blog.