Paper or Plastic and the Environment But it is Still About Me

The debate over plastic bags along with local and state governments wanting to remove the option from our shopping trips leaves a lot for one to think about. As a matter of full disclosure I obviously favor paper bags as my choice for carrying my grocery purchases home from the store. I especially like the heavy duty ones with handles.

I do recognize that meat and poultry products leaking through my paper bag would be messy if not dangerous so there is still a need for smaller plastic bags to take care of these situations. My awareness level for food contamination and food borne bacteria has increased over the last five years thanks to the media and the stories about the chance for an animal urinating on the produce products in the fields that I might buy. No leaking trays of chicken juice or bloody packages of ground beef do not even make the sensational headlines on the Fox Noise Channel but it is just gross to look at these things in my shopping cart and think about the possible consequences that they may bring.

A friend of mine would call me anal in my grocery shopping habits for I make my trip through the store with the precision of a military pilot with a GPS unit. First the produce department is shopped with each “fresh” item dutifully entombed in its own small plastic bag. Although some stores need to watch what type of plastic bags they use for these purposes because I have used some that just will not open up after being yanked from the roll. I know that some people have seen me struggle with the bags and then just mumble under my breath that these types of bags are evil. In all fairness they are usually the cheapest ones for a store to buy just ask Uzzi.

After my journey through the produce department I make my way to the dairy department scrutinizing the sell by dates. What I have noticed in my grocery store is that the sell by dates seem to be closer and closer to the current date than ever before. I first noticed this a year ago when this particular supermarket chain had announced a new round of cost cutting moves to boost profitability. Were these two issues related? I do not know the answer but is all I know is that they left my plastic produce bags alone and I can still easily open them at will.

Anyway after a quick trip up a couple of traditional grocery aisles I arrive in the meat department and there I begin to be ecological unsound once again. Every tray or package of “fresh” meat or poultry that goes into my cart is encased like pieces of asbestos having been just removed from the basement of your grandmothers old house. Some packages of meat, like roasts, can not be accommodated by just one of those tear off bags nope sometimes it takes two or three of them to complete the mummification process. On some shopping trips I can not even find one package that is not oozing juice or blood like something out of a True Blood show. I think that I am going to recommend that supermarkets install sink and shower facilities for the customers to use after selecting their meat department purchases.

These department plastic bags can cost between 1/2 and 1 cent for the retailer to buy while the plastic bags for use at the registers can cost 1 cent and more depending on store logo and community message requirements. Paper bags are a couple of cents while the really good ones with the handles costs even more. Of course there are levels of quality and strength within the plastic and paper bag lines but as far as Uzzi is concerned the cheaper the better. As long as the customer get’s out the door with their purchases then it is their problem as he would say. In the mean time he feels that he has to keep the costs down because he is taking his wife and kids to Europe soon and they need the traveling money.

I remember the time that one of the product distributors that calls on the Uzzi Family business mentioned that they had some reusable shopping bags that a CPG, look that term up or follow the hyperlink, company was using to promote a particular line of dinner entres and the Uzzi company could have a couple of boxes of them to give out to their customers. Give out Uzzi must have thought, yea right. Well as Uzzi usually does he got the distributor to provide even more boxes of these FREE reusable shopping bags to Uzzi Family company. I thought to myself wow Uzzi is really a dedicated ecologist or at least more green than I thought he would be capable of being. Of course Alex you were wrong, just dead wrong.

Here was Uzzi’s plan, get as many of the FREE reusable shopping bags as possible and then turnaround and sell them to the Uzzi Supermarket chain customers for what he feels is a discounted price – maybe a buck. Like magic the boxes of FREE reusable shopping bags flowed into the stores and then were put on racks for the customers to buy. When Uzzi ran out of these FREE bags to sell he somehow got more. This went on for a while and I guess that is why some people say that there is money in the green movement it is just that I did not realize that this was one of the ways to do it.

As to reusable shopping bags well I just do not know where I stand on them. These bags do tend to get dirty much less worn after a few months of usage. Depending on the material that they are made out of they get bit funky. Now some customers bring in their reusable shopping bags that are adorned with logos and other chic graphics.

To begin with there are reusable shopping bags like the ones from the local Public Radio fund drive, the charity walk, the Green organizations but then there are the ones from ones personal vacations and upscale retailers. Yes narcissism is alive and well even in the world of reusable shopping bags. Let’s see you have the ones who’s writing on the bags say I have been to the Bahamas or Amsterdam and how about the ones that say Coach or Chanel. How did reusable shopping bags become just another opportunity for someone to be a Label Whore and say that this bag is all about me? Narcissism at it’s best even in the world of ecology.

Sorry I was on another tangent so it is time to return to the main theme of this post. Can you imagine what kind of bacteria and germs are on those reusable shopping bags after a couple of trips to the supermarket? What happens if you do not wrap your meat purchases in plastic bags before putting them into your reusable bag? If you do not put your produce purchases in plastic bags first than to me it means that before you get those peppers or onions home they would have had a chance to leech the dog urine that was applied to your produce products before they were picked at the farm on to the bag itself. That’s right and that Baguette in the thin paper sleeve that you put in that reusable bag gets that same animal urine from the produce products on the bread as well. Yea go ahead and use those reusable bags now – not me.

You can see why I might have issues with reusable bags and now when I am in a grocery store I take a closer look at what type of bags that they are trying to sell to their customers. Some retailers today have ones with that cardboard bottom however the sides are recycled paper and not that strong. Then they put this yarn type string in for handles and want to charge a dollar for those bags along with the stores logo. Some have the true recycled weave style bags with the international symbol for recycling on them. The thing with those type of bags is that what the hell were they recycled from? The ones that I have touched felt like they were made from 6 pack soda rings and old sneakers.

Now back to my shopping trip I usually finish up in the Frozen Food section for some Ice Cream and then it is down the main aisle to the checkout. Where I live now there is no more paper or plastic bags it is just plastic. Whether you get checked out by a cashier or use the infamous Self Checkout Registers – for the life of me I still can not get use to a retailer wanting me to ring up and bag my own purchase but more on that in another post, you get plastic. At my regular store the thickness of the bag has gotten thinner and thinner over the last few years. If you put more that 8 or 9 items in the bag or if you accidentally bump the side of the bag with a straight edge or something then it splits open.

I know that Uzzi is a possessed item in the bag counter type of person. Whenever he is in a store, either his families or a competitors, with laser like focus Uzzi looks and sees how many items a cashier is putting into a plastic bag. Fill it to the max is his philosophy. Oh and no double bagging for Uzzi’s customers so do not even think about asking for them because the family is planning on buying new company cars for themselves and Mercedes, BMW, Infinity and Lexus will not take plastic bags on a trade in. Thank God someone is helping the automobile industry in these trying economic times.

One day a while back I saw Uzzi run after some little old lady that had just left the store because she grabbed a couple, yes a couple of plastic bags from an unmanned checkout stand. He moved out the automatic door like a lion on the hunt and pounced on the elderly lady before she could walk out of the loading zone. While I could not hear the words that were exchanged the facial antics of Uzzi and the utter look of bewilderment on the face of the little old lady was one of those images that I will never forget. As Uzzi returned to the store I watched the lady that procured those couple of extra bags take one out and put her gallon of milk in, I guess to give it extra support for her walk home and the second one she fashioned as an impromptu plastic hat since it was raining very hard that day. I later asked the store manager if he knew that customer who had picked up the two extra plastic bags and he said oh yes she is in here 4 or 5 times a week and buys groceries for herself and a couple of others at the retirement home a mile up the street. He asked me why I wanted to know that and I said never mind. Uzzi really knew how to take customer relations to a new lower level.

Paper or Plastic the choices are less today than they were even a few years ago. Again I want to consider myself ecologically aware but not driven. When cities in California instituted their plastic bag ban the warning shot was sounded but I heard salvation. When the local government in Washington D.C. did the same thing my spirits were raised. I know that at some point in my community I will get my paper bags back and plastic bags will be banned from the supermarket. I am counting the days.

Well I have to dash now and stop to pick up my dry cleaning which will come encased in three very large plastic bags – thank goodness for the Green Movement.

AB

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