Posts Tagged ‘plastic bags’
Not Easy Bein’ Green - Part 4
I’m rescinding what I said at the end of the last entry of “Not Easy Bein’ Green”.
Maybe the grocery store isn’t the best place for us to pick our veggies.
I’ve already copped to having a problem getting the cloth bags into the store. I have them, I want to use them, but when I’m getting out of the car it doesn’t pop readily to mind that I should grab those cloth bags. I know those bags are the major method by which us ordinary folks get to exhibit some mild superhero tendencies and save the earth. But I’m just not good at it.
I’ve lately been pleased to find that I’m not the only one. Although this does make me sad for the future of earth. I thought you were remembering your cloth bags! How do I know you haven’t remembered your bags either? Because the supermarkets have sprouted signs that say “Did you remember to get your cloth bags from the car?” Yup, they didn’t put that up at three different Krogers just for me. They aren’t the only ones doing this, either. (I think Publix has the best sign: “Reduce, Reuse, Remember”.)
Also sadly, two of my bags have had to be retired already – one for a hole in the bottom and another for a broken strap. Unfortunately, both these conditions are fatal. If I were the kind to think about the money, I would say that I’m pretty sure I didn’t earn back my buck-oh-nine before they broke, but knock-on-new-growth-sustainable-wood, I think the others are holding up well.
These bags all have a future traveling back and forth to the grocery, and Bravo for them. Unfortunately, just getting them in supermarket the door isn’t enough.
I have this other problem with the bags. I not only have to get them into the store with me, I have to have them at the ready before the checker starts ringing my purchases. Because it’s really hit or miss as to whether they’ll ask if you brought your own bag. And if they don’t ask and you aren’t watching like a hawk, you’ve got three plastic bags with an average of two items in each in your cart before you can say, “But I brought my own!”
I know this because it happened to me just the other day. I took the bags into the store. Then I shopped. Naturally, the food went on top of the bags (they were at the bottom and I didn’t need them . . . yet.) It was a good day, the line moved quickly, there was a checker and two baggers. And before I could say “But I brought my own!” I had five plastic bags in my cart.
I blurted it out anyway. Bagging stopped. I have to take an aside here and say this is my fault. I’ve made this mistake before and stood gape-mouthed as baggers took my food out of plastic bags, placed it into cloth bags then wadded the plastic and threw it in the trash. What the hell? At least if the plastic had gone home with me I would have reused it for . . . for . . . something!
This time my hapless baggers didn’t chuck the plastic. Nope, they set the plastic bags into the cloth bags and put those into the cart. I sighed. I would have said something, but I was distracted by the checker bouncing the apples on the scale/scanner.
What?! I spent time picking out un-bruised fruit and the checker bounced them! Then, (because, yes, it gets worse) she rolled them to the baggers, who dropped them into bags. Then she asked one of the baggers for an apple that didn’t scan and the poor green orb went rolling back to the checker then to the bagger again in a sick version of Red-Rover.
But it wasn’t over yet. No, my milk was in a cloth bag (around a plastic bag) and my apples (bruised like my little heart) were in the insulated bag. I tried to be polite when I pointed out that the insulated bag was for the cold things, please. After a blank stare I added, ‘like the milk and the frozen veggies.’ But the baggers looked at me and the bag as though I had asked them to do all this while reciting the alphabet, backward.
All I could think was . . . well I won’t repeat what I was actually thinking, but I did also think this: that bag says “Kroger” on it in big letters, so it’s not like they’ve never seen an insulated bag before. They sold it to me. And it’s not like it’s a discontinued item or something that the newbies wouldn’t have seen before. Not ten feet away was a display that had a sign on the top saying the insulated bags were for cold things! So why were the baggers acting like monkeys who’d been handed a computer? No, that’s a bad analogy. The monkeys would have figured out something cool to do with the computer. These two had no clue.
Well, crap. I should have just bagged it myself.
I’m apologizing to you now. I’m the one responsible for the clog at self-check. I’m the one with the full cart and long line behind me. But I want you to know why, before you and your one item get mad at me. I would gladly go to the checkers if I could trust them not to bounce my apples – and no, that’s not a metaphor for anything dirty. Me and my apples are going home un-abused this time. And I’m sitting down for a tall glass of cold milk when I get there. I thank you in advance.
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Not easy bein’ green - Part 1
There are a lot of things we can all do without much effort. And most of us aren’t doing them. Some things there are really no good excuse for: Like using plastic bags. Every grocery store and its’ brothers all sell those cloth re-usable bags for 99c.
Just think, Kroger gives you 4c credit every time you use one of your own bags! This means in a mere 27 trips you will have paid off your bag. (I’m counting the 9c of tax in there, too.) In that same 27 trips you will have discovered that your cloth bag holds twice as much as a single plastic bag, and never needs to be double bagged. Was this accounted for in that 4c? Or am I getting gypped?
Nevermind. I’m saving the environment. And I can sling my grocery bag over my shoulder, can you? As South Park so aptly put it, I am no longer creating ‘smog’ I have moved up to creating ‘smug’. Five more baby ducks will survive to adulthood because I brought my bags today. And I got 20c!
In that same 27 trips to earn back the price of your bags, you will also walk an extra five miles. ‘Huh?’ You say, ‘how is that?’ Some of you are better at this than me and you will never make the extra five miles, but me, I clock the time: Going back to my car to get the bags out of the trunk.
I started to give my kids a quarter every time they remembered the bags, thus greatly increasing my number of trips before the bags are paid off, BUT greatly decreasing my number of trips back to the car. Unfortunately, my kids suck at it as bad as I do. Basically, I’m never going to earn back the cost of the insulated bag for milk and ice cream, but I will continue being smug.
There are other things to do, too. Sara Snow, on ‘Get Fresh’, (https://www.singledad.com/home-and-cooking/articles/Sara_Snow_s_Simple_Steps_to_Live_Green_1214980981.php) tells us to unplug things. Everything. My Dad’s a physicist and he disagrees with Sara. He points out that non-transformer plugs don’t draw a current unless the thing is on. So who cares? And you sure don’t want to unplug it while you’re using it.
But what about transformer plugs? (Those bulky black boxes that make it impossible to plug anything into the other socket in the outlet.) I hear they’re evil! Some conservationists/granola-nut-jobs call them ‘vampires’ because they suck so much energy.
I was going around the house unplugging them while my father laughed at me. He said the hairdryer might draw 2c of electricity in a month. Well, I’m joining up with Sara Snow then: I want my 2c! Again, (*sigh*) this is followed by a sentence that starts ‘unfortunately’.
Unfortunately, there were only 4 things to unplug. I can’t unplug the phone. It doesn’t even work without the base plugged in, let alone take messages. I won’t unplug my computer because I would go clinically insane waiting for Windows to start up every time I sat down. Sometimes Yahoo is just too slow for me. And I understand that we should unplug the TV every night before bed - Sara wants to know who is watching TV at 3 AM. TiVo is, that’s who! I can’t miss an old episode of ‘House’! So TV stays plugged.
But I’ve done what I can. I’ve reduced my electric bill by 96c per year!
Ahhhh, the satisfaction of a job well done.
Listen to AJ's Podcast SMART CHICKENS
Because Sometimes We All Just Want to Fly the Coop!
Subscribe to my podcast SMART CHICKENS in iTunes -
