Well I guess I’ll have to stop hassling The Warehouse over plastic bags for now. Went shopping yesterday in Upper Hutt and got asked if I wanted a plastic bag – back to normal again! The weekend newspaper (Dominion Post 21/03/2009) also reported that of April 20 The Warehouse is going to charge 10 cents per bag to encourage shoppers to reduce their plastic bag use.
The Warehouse and Plastic Bags
I’m not sure what’s been happening with The Warehouse lately. The last two trips our items have been automatically put in a plastic bag at different Warehouse stores – Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt. The other day my husband bought one DVD and it was put in a plastic bag???!!! If my husband is asked he will say ‘no’ to a plastic bag so it is important that consumers like him are given the option by the checkout operators. I would have thought that with businesses trying to save money that asking consumers if they want a plastic bag would be a good way to reduce costs. Up to now in my survey (see ‘Say no to plastic bags’) the Warehouse has always been great at asking about plastic bags – what’s going on? The Warehouse signed the Packaging Accord so it would be good to see them not dropping their standards. Although Woolworths is part of the Packaging Accord also and they, as I have commented on before, put everything in a plastic bag! The Packaging Accord is due to expire in June – save this link for keeping up to date with what is happening re the new packaging product stewardship scheme Packaging Council of New Zealand (Inc) : Media News
Weekly shopping trip
It was our weekly trip to the grocery store this morning. When you only let yourself go food shopping once a week it becomes a little more exciting! Hubby even had the shopping bags all organised ready to go this morning.
I was glad I wore my jeans to do our grocery shopping this morning as I ended up spending a lot of time crouching on the floor peering at the price of the brands that get stocked right down at floor level. I have to admit I didn’t see many people doing the same thing but that’s ok – I don’t mind looking silly while I’m saving a few dollars.
It was startling to see how many people are still buying plastic bags to put their groceries in. Even if you’re not into the environment thing buying a shopping bag would be paid off in a few weeks compared to the constant price of buying plastic bags so it makes sense money wise. Or bringing cardboard boxes (if you have a car) would be even cheaper.
I noticed when looking at the price screen at the counter that the advertisement was promoting buying shopping bags. Thumbs up to Pak n Save for reminding people that they don’t need to buy plastic bags. Woolworths on the other hand would have to be the worst supermarket I’ve found – everything is automatically put in a bag even if only one item. They seem determined to use up as many plastic bags as possible.
I wonder what would happen if a supermarket didn’t provide plastic bags at all for customers??? I presume we would all still come and shop.
Plastic bag update
Well it’s almost the end of January and we have changed lots of our plastic bag behaviour so far this year. Today I added a new idea that we hadn’t tried before. Not only did I bring our shopping bags with us to do the shopping, I also brought with us our small plastic bags that came from the fruit and vegetables last week. We will just continue to use these same bags each week.
We are also sharing our wheeli bin with my mum as now that we are trying harder to reduce our waste there is very little rubbish in the bin each week. My mum saves money as the price of plastic rubbish bags has risen to $2.16 per bag and it also means one less rubbish bin bag a week gets bought.
We could probably share our bin with at least 3 other people in the street and share the cost, rather than all of us putting out our bins and bags each week! It’s a pity that we don’t really have that sense of community in many of our streets anymore as grouping together often makes sense economically.
Plastic bags in the news
Well we’ve just finished a dinner of home cooked hamburgers – 4 hamburgers came out at a total of $7.20 plus electricity costs. I’m happy with that. Once we’ve saved enough money to landscape our property I’ll be able to grow some of my own vegetables and hopefully get the price of my meals down a bit more.
An article in the national paper’s Greenzone section today (Dominion post) was looking at the NZ plastic bag situation. It brought up some points that I have been discussing in the last few weeks regarding what happens when you stop taking plastic bags and therefore run out of them in your house!. The article gave the statistic that sales of heavy kitchen rubbish bags rose 15 per cent last year presumably because of people no longer having plastic bags to use in their rubbish bins. So one form of plastic is reduced while another is increased!
The article also noted that although biodegradable bags are available in NZ they are not available in supermarkets for shoppers to easily purchase. This is something that I have been noticing about a lot of products that are more enviro – friendly. Many of them require the consumer to order from websites or to go to special shops. If we know of good products I guess we really have a responsibility as consumers to start asking supermarkets for them to see if we can bring about a change.
Update on my no plastic bag project: I am still using newspaper to line my kitchen rubbish bin and it’s going great but I think it works well because we have a small rubbish bin so the paper lines it really well forming a sort of paper bucket.
Small ‘projects’
One of the side effects of saying ‘no’ to plastic bags has been that I am running out of plastic bags in the house. On reflection I decided that rather than getting biodegradable bags to line the bin it would seem more sensible to use newspaper. We have lots of newspaper as my husband insists on getting the paper daily ( non – negotiable!). With purchasing biodegradable bags there is the manufacture of the bags, transport from the manufacturer to the internet company and then delivery of the bags to me. So one of my projects last week was to try out lining my bin with newspaper. I have just emptied it and everything worked well, no leaks, the bin is clean – success!
One of my other projects has been to reduce the amount of paper towels I use. I noticed during my record of my trash week that there were too many paper towels in my rubbish. So I have created a rag bag from old cut up t shirts. I can now do many of my cleaning and wiping tasks using rags. These then go into a bucket in the laundry and get washed when the bucket is full – they are all out fluttering in the wind at the moment. I still have a way to go though on reducing my use of paper towels – I will need to continue to work on more strategies to stop myself reaching for paper towels so often.
Plastic Bags
I was browsing through some of the NZ sites of groups working to reduce the number of plastic shopping bags we use – No Plastic Bags in New Zealand and Plastic shopping bag free. I thought it would be an interesting personal exercise to see how many businesses are asking customers if they want plastic bags or not. Although I usually say no to plastic bags I’ve never thought about how many bags that ‘saves’. I’ve therefore set up a separate page “Say no to plastic bags” where I can keep a record of the transactions I have with shops and the bags I say no to. At the end of the year I’ll be able to see how many bags I have refused and can calculate how many bags we could be saving as a nation if I am viewed as an average person.
I still find I want bags for things around the house so I will need to get organized this year and sort out some alternatives – paper bags, biodegradable bags. Of course I would have to pay for these while most shops give me plastic bags for free. There have been suggestions that building in a charge for plastic bags, such as Pak n Save does, would help reduce the number of plastic bags as once you charge for an item consumers become more reluctant to take that item when there is a cheaper alternative such as bringing your own bags when shopping.
PS I just found an article published today by the National Business Review regarding the Packaging Accord. Surely we can do better than a reduction by one fifth?