Landfill Versus Petri Dish - The Return of the Plastic Shopping Bag

Throughout the country, municipalities had been enacting laws banning the business practice of one-time use plastic bags.  Those ever so convenient bags that proudly bore the store's logo and were readily available at each checkout that you'd just pull open, fill, take off the holders, put in your cart and repeat until done were going away, becoming obsolete one city or county at a time.  In their place, reusable bags made of various materials that consumers would purchase, fill, take home, then bring back and use again were to become the norm.  No longer would consumers collect the one-timers and reuse them for trash, or just toss them out after one use.  No longer would these bags clog our landfills, streams, etc. and become the bane of our ecologically-conscious existence.  That was the plan.

Then along came COVID-19.

The thing about those reusable bags is that we weren't always treating them with the respect we should have been.  Specifically, they weren't always being cleaned.  Some of the materials used didn't handle the washing too well, while others simply never saw the interior of a laundry room too often.  We'd reuse them until they were visibly less than spiffy, then clean them, retire them to other duties, or toss them like the one-timer plastic bags before them.  They became transfer points of grocery store germs to home and back again, now with our house germs included, and each time they were used without being washed and/or sanitized in some way just compounded the problem.  Most, but not all of those little micro-buggers that were being carted back and forth were harmless.  However, our latest coronavirus visitor which has caused a pandemic in its wake has also made us aware of our bad habits with regard to those lovely reusable bags, and the outcry against their use has been getting louder and louder.

In response, stores have started to bring back their one-time use plastic bags, with some not allowing customers to use the bags they brought with them. The holders for the one-time use bags were still there because they were convenient to hang the reusuable bags on to fill. Local lawmakers who had seen fit to try and save the planet one piece of molded plastic at a time now had to agree that, for the moment, one-time use bags are the more sanitary option.

So, they're back, folks, likely for the duration of this health emergency, slowly making a comeback to a store near you.  One-time use bags once again have their place in our lives.  We will use them and toss them and repeat that process the next time we buy goods to go in them.  Reusable grocery carriers will eventually regain their status as our beloved food transporters.  But until then, do us a favor and wash them.