More About Cloth Bags

As Ariana wrote last week, reusable shopping bags are one of the easiest green changes you can make in your lifestyle. So, I'm going to write about them again and share a little about my own experiences with green shopping.

Like her, when I was first introduced to reusable shopping bags, I was skeptical. When I watched Oprah raving about taking your own cloth bags to the grocery store, I scoffed, convinced such a practice just wasn't practical. For one thing, the particular tote bag she gave away to each member of her audience didn't look roomy enough to hold many groceries. And, as a shopper on a budget (unlike Oprah!), my inability to shell out for enough such bags to accommodate my week's groceries for two (and what about one day when there are children in my household, and I have twice the groceries to lug home?) took priority over the environment.

Then, during my weekly grocery run, I saw these for sale in Wal Mart:



On sale for $1 apiece. On closer inspection, one bag appeared roomy enough to fit the gallon of orange juice and the gallon of milk in my shopping cart. And, more importantly, strong enough to carry them. That would cut down on two plastic sacks. If I could fit twice as many groceries into one of these reusable backs as would normally require two plastic sacks (or more, seeing as many cashiers have the tendency to double-bag milk, juice, and canned goods) and do it for say, $5, maybe this reusable shopping bag idea wasn't so impractical, after all.

So I bought five of the bags, and now my weekly grocery shopping looks like this:



I love my shopping bags. My groceries stay more organized now: milk and juice together, cold things together, canned goods together, produce together, etc. I can get my five bags from the cart to the trunk and from the trunk into the house much more efficiently than I used to, with the added bonus of not being worried about plastic sacks breaking under the weight of the food. Maybe best of all, my pantry doesn't fill up with the hundreds of plastic bags that accumulate week after week of shopping, which can't be put in our city recycling bins.

One area that is not at all efficient, however, is getting my groceries from the shopping cart into my bags at the checkout line. This is mainly a problem at Wal Mart, where the checkout lines have bag carousels that make it easy for the checkers to bag groceries. The set-up there is not at all conducive to shopping with reusable bags, and on more than one occasion I've been met with eye rolls and heavy sighs that I'm making their job difficult. One cashier even went on a rant about how Wal Mart shouldn't sell those bags if they're not going to make it easy for the checkers to bag groceries properly. Mostly I have to hold my bags open on the tiny surface on top of the bag carousel for the cashier to put in, or sometimes, I'm expected to bag them myself. The cashiers at Wal Mart don't appear to have been trained in any kind of system for dealing with cloth bags, which is a real shame for Wal Mart's promise of good customer service.

It's not just the regular checkout lines that are problematic. The self-checkout lanes are a huge pain, because they're not programmed to account for the weight of personal shopping bags. You have to scan an item and then select "skip bagging," which really holds things up at Wal Mart, where a store code is required to override the bagging scale.

All that's gotten me to thinking. I really applaud all the retailers who are providing their green-minded customers with an affordable alternative to plastic, and even paper, bags. But that Wal Mart cashier, if rather melodramatic, was right. If retailers really want to encourage eco-friendly shopping, they'll go the extra mile and re-configure their checkout lanes for the convenience of their cashiers, and re-program the self-checkout computers to include an option for reusable shopping bags to keep those lines moving swiftly for their customers. We need to write Wal Mart (and our retailers of choice) and let them know how much green shopping means to them, and encourage them to make the changes necessary to make responsible habits like reusable shopping bags the norm.

One way to go green... cloth bags

I’ll admit, when I first heard about using cloth bags for grocery shopping, I was kind of stumped. A friend suggested it to me and I thought of every reason why not to – including wondering what people would think when they saw me doing so. Silly, I know. Finally, one day I caved and bought two bags at the local grocery store – at only 99 cents a piece, I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

Wow. I’ve totally changed my opinion – cloth bags are awesome. I figure that every time I do my weekly grocery shopping, I use at least 4 plastic bags. At 52 weeks in a year, that’s 208 plastic bags that I use… and that’s just one year! Now my 2 cloth bags manage to hold everything that my plastic bags used to hold, and then some! They are durable, I don’t have to worry about them breaking, and they’re convenient – my two bags and I get up to my third floor apartment with much less of a struggle than the plastic bags.

Yes, cloth bags are everywhere now, some expensive and some not so expensive. When I go grocery shopping now (as opposed to when I first started, a few months ago), I see more people using them, but they’re still in the minority – they make up maybe a fifth of the customers, as far as I can tell. I hope that they continue to become “popular” and that more people can appreciate them, like I do!

Welcome! (Don't forget to wipe your feet.)

There are few things trendier these days than "going green" and adopting an eco-friendly lifestyle. Let it never be said that Ariana and Lisa failed to follow a trend. Unlike so many trends, like the Atkins diet or Crocs, we hope this one won't be a passing one. (Please, God, please let the Crocs trend pass!)

Neither of us is an environmental expert. We didn't start this blog to rant and rave about truths, inconvenient or otherwise. As far as we're concerned, climate change could be the result of humans, or it could be a naturally-occurring process -- we don't know. But whatever the case, we do know that humans can bring about positive change to our Earth in the seemingly smallest of ways. We can walk more, waste less, and make a big difference in the footprint we leave on our planet. Here at Greener Footprints, we'll share the experiences of two normal twentysomethings doing what we can to tread lightly on the earth.

But before we do that, we'd like to tell you a little bit about ourselves.

Ariana is an elementary teacher who started recycling at school by printing things on the backs of old worksheets, handouts, etc. When she found that it saved her from having to beg the office for more paper, she smiled. Then she got told by a friend to start using cloth bags. At first she was nervous and felt silly but then she realized that it made her feel good and proud and now she walks through the grocery store with her head held high. She looks for other ways to go green but sometimes a lack of money gets in the way...

Lisa is an aspiring novelist who decided all that paper she tears out of her notebooks in fits of frustration really ought to be recycled. Then Oprah told her to buy cloth shopping bags, so she did, and using them made her so happy she decided there might be something to this green living, after all.