Bag the Bag

The city recently proposed a ban on plastic grocery bags, following the lead of San Francisco, Brownsville, two counties in Hawaii and the entire nation of Ireland. This being Portland, we saw quite a lot of support for the ban. And this being America, we also saw quite a lot of dissent. The newspaper was full of angry letters to the editor, particularly from dog owners who can't imagine how they will pick up poop without a steady supply of bags from grocery runs, but also from indignant shoppers who simply find it handier to cart their goods in plastic handle bags than in paper or in canvas.

You'd think from reading these letters that the Right to Convenience were enshrined in our constitution. But that attitude didn't surprise me. What surprised me was the implication that plastic bags are precious and hard to come by.

My own experience has been that simply by washing, drying and saving the plastic bags that come into our lives, we end up in very short order with far more bags than we can store. (We have one of those wooden bag-dryers; it lives on the kitchen counter and dries about eight bags at a time.) We've never used plastic grocery bags, and in the old days (before we stopped buying any plastic) our plastic-bag drawer was always full. We regularly recycled bags because there was no place else to put so many.

Now that even fewer are coming our way, we aren't moving as many out of the house -- and when The Experiment began we went through the collection and set aside the best bags to hang on to. I'm confident they will last the year. If they don't, we won't have to look very hard to find second-hand ones. We will not have to start taking virgin bags from the supermarket.