This column is for Callaway Climate Insights subscribers only, but it’s OK to share once in a while. Was it shared with you? Please subscribe.
As the cook in our home, I go out almost every day to the corner market. And I always carry a reusable shopping bag, in part because I am trying to do the right thing and partly because New York has banned the once-ubiquitous thin plastic ones. Also, if I’m honest, I don’t want to pay 25 cents or so for the more sturdy plastic bags that the store sells to customers who haven’t brought their own.
And it’s those brawnier bags that have produced an embarrassing backfire in the bid to cut back on plastic waste. Why? Because, as a recent study shows, despite a 60% decline in bag volumes, it resulted in a threefold increase in plastic consumption for grocery bags. In short, the heavy-duty polypropylene bags that people buy at the store — and often discard after a single use — use about 15 times more plastic than the skinny polyethylene ones that were used before.
It gets worse.