Good-bye Plastic!

Good-bye Plastic!

After 30 or so years of trying to make New Year's resolutions I never keep, I'm limiting myself to one small incremental change for 2008. My husband always jokes that the key to success is low expectations. My mantra is “Let yourself off the hook for the moment but not for the long run.” I may slip up for a day or two, but I've promised myself that won't be an excuse for abandoning my little resolution altogether.

So here's my small contribution to reducing global warming: I'm giving up plastic--not the Visa or Mastercard kind--but the ubiquitous bags you find at every chain store, the coffee lids I get at Starbucks, and especially, the disposable water bottle.

It hasn't been hard to get started. I had two canvas bags from a Palo Alto, California, Recycling initiative, and I've acquired the rest from grocery chains. If I forget my canvas bags, I just buy another one. I have a collection now from Whole Foods, Albertson's, and Sunflower Market, enough to always have a few in the trunk of my car. At first, I got strange looks from the brand-name grocery store clerks and even a few sighs when they had to take out items they'd already started stuffing in plastic bags because I pointed out that I'd brought my own.

But two days ago, I noticed that the clerk was putting groceries into another woman's Whole Foods bag and that between us was another customer requesting plastic but looking with curiosity at these two “bring-your-own-baggers.” I was no longer a minority in the checkout line!

My eight-year-old son started the water bottle boycott at his elementary school after listening to an NPR piece on the waste produced by the popular bottled water industry – 4 billion gallons were sold in individual containers in 2006 in the U.S. Alone, and nearly a third of those end up in the trash. So we bought reusable bottles, a Brita filter, and started drinking filtered tap water.

Today I walked up to my local gym, and two guys were handing out bottles of water as a promotion for their company. “No thanks,” I said. “I brought my own. I'm reducing my carbon footprint by not using disposable water bottles. Yes, they both looked at me as if I were crazy.

But think about it. It's not that easy to reduce your driving by more than a few miles a week, and buying a Prius is beyond most people's means. But plastic is produced from natural gas and petroleum, and plastic is also something that I can easily choose not to consume. That may not mean a great deal for one person who on average consumes 28 gallons of bottled water a year. But if more of us kicked the bottled water habit, we'd not only make a collective dent in our dependency on foreign oil, we'd also save $11 billion a year. For that cost savings, we could each get ourselves a decent bottle of champagne to celebrate.

For grocery stores and big-chains like Target and Wal-Mart, this is a great opportunity to brand your green credentials by putting your logo on a canvas bag and selling it to your customers. And consumers, please buy those bags and then don't leave home without one.