The Big Bag

Hurrah for you for adopting reusable bags into your shopping routines!
Green bagging is one hot trend that helps us humans chill our carbon tootsies.

I confess to converting late to bagism, well after I became environmentally aware. Back when Earth Day and I were ardent twenty-somethings, I rudely pooh-poohed the string bags and cloth sacks touted by my fellow Greenies.

In my humble opinion – and experience - those wimpy little twit-bags did not have the right stuff to transport a real person’s grocery load. Maybe a couple of baguettes, sure, or getting one dinner’s worth of produce home from a morning market stop, but that’s they way they shop in France. This is the big-bag U.S. of A. We’d need much more bag for our buck to get us to re-pack our packaging habits. I know I did.

The bag that changed my shopping life came from Earth Day ’95. Festival organizers raised some funds hawking a batch of bags leftover from the ’94 World Cup, tourney-sponsor logo-stamped by MasterCard – a respectable pedigree of reuse!

These are mighty sturdy bags: double-bottomed, heavy-duty canvas with double-thickness extra-long handles. They’re exactly the kind of bag L.L. Bean will emblazon with your logo, call it a monogram, and sell to you for $30, plus shipping and handling. I got mine for five bucks each. Did I bag a bargain, or what?

The only problem I’ve had with these champion bags is that grocery checkers can load ‘em up with 50-plus pounds of purchase, a challenging schlep for a middle-aged babe whose only power-lifting practice is when I power-shop.

Equipped with such capable bags, is there any reason anymore to succumb to the lure of “paper or plastic?” Yes, especially when I slip up and stop by the store bagless. It happens. Time to bag the Green Guilt and appreciate anew the merits of temporary tools.

I use paper grocery bags to line my kitchen garbage can, plus they sure do keep the chips out of harm’s way when I’m stocking up on cans of anything. And what if an eco-ignorant bagger-kid slips my bananas into plastic before I can fling my super-filler-uppers down the conveyor? There’s nothing better to bag up shoes inside a suitcase or a potluck container full of sloppy soupy stuff. Then those bags can get recycled.

Jean Ponzi airs her views – and those of many cool Green guests – every Tuesday 7-8 p.m. on “Earthworms,” the environmental talk show broadcast live on FM-88 KDHX St. Louis Community Radio – streamed and podcast at www.kdhx.org.