Neither Plastic Nor Paper

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 10, 2008

When it comes to movements, social or political, I’m more of a leader than a follower.

That is why when I was in college, for example, I didn’t join in the popular “Don’t Eat Grapes” movement. (For those of you who have forgotten, or never knew, there was a time when grape pickers were trying to organize a union and the way you showed your allegiance to them was to swear off grapes. I can’t remember if the effort was successful or not.) At the time, I didn’t like eating grapes but just on principle I used to munch a few when I had a chance just to declare my non-conformity.

No, when it comes to movements, I like to create them on my own rather than fall in line with the crowd.

That’s why I formed the “Move Chadds Ford to Chester County” movement and the “Illuminate the Twin Bridges of Creek Road” movement and the “Build a Public Swimming Pool in My Neighborhood in West Chester” movement. These were movements that I could hold complete sway over with little effort, largely because the movements were made up of me and no one else.

But lately I’ve been drawn to a movement that seems to be gathering steam across not just the country, but the globe: a rejection of the plastic grocery bag.

You know, the so-called “undershirt bag” that looks like a man’s athletic t-shirt. The ubiquitous carry all shopping bag routinely dispensed in stores of all manner and stripe.

They are an environmental nuisance. Made of fossil-fuel based polymers, the bags are non-biodegradable and virtually indestructible. They remain for centuries in landfills, and clog the waterways. Ducks and fish presumably die from trying to ingest them.

Lately, local governments in New York City and San Francisco have enacted legislation to seeks t o reduce their use. In Ireland, they are taxed. In China, the world's fastest-growing economy, they are banned and shoppers are encouraged people to use cloth ones instead."This issue is not going away,”said Allen Hershkowitz, director of the solid waste program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. (He’s my presumptive choice for leader of the movement, mostly because his last name sounds so unbelievably impressive.)

I was introduced to the situation when reading pieces in The New Yorker by Ian Frazier, a wonderful writer, who discussed his growing hatred of seeing bags in trees. He even invented a device for removing them, called and patented as the “bag snagger.” He wrote: “To me, a bag in a tree is like a flag of chaos, and when I remove it I'm capturing the flag of the other side. In the end it doesn't matter how ironic or serious or even effective on a larger scale bag snagging may be. Doing it demonstrates that even in the odd little overlooked wilderness the bags inhabit, people still can use their eyes and hands and brains, and still have dominion over the chaos of bags in trees.”

Now, when I see a bag in a tree I wish them ill, and vow never to carry another one out into the wild. I have a growing collection of cloth bags from a variety of stores, and my biggest worry seems to be using one franchise’s bag in another’s check out lane.

From now on, all my eggs will go in a non-plastic basket so to speak. Ditto the grapes.