Brigitte Bowers: Plastic bags not worth the harm

A few years ago, my family hosted Maxime, a foreign exchange student from Lille, France, for a semester.

One day early in his visit, Maxime accompanied me on a food shopping expedition. On the way to the store, I realized I had left my shopping bags at home. We were already halfway to our destination, and I reasoned that the extra gas required to turn around, go home, get the bags, and resume the trip, might be more damaging to the environment than the negative impact of using one or two plastic bags. After all, I was only buying a few things.

And then, while we were checking out, Maxime did something entirely unexpected as the grocery clerk started to bag out items. He waved the clerk off, made a kangaroo pocket out of his over-sized T-shirt, and stuffed the butter, eggs, and cheese in it.

“You can carry the milk,” he said, and proceeded toward our car.

As I was turning the key in the ignition, I asked him if everyone carried their own bags in France. The answer was yes.

“So then, do they use plastic or paper at the store when people forget their bags?” I asked.

“No,” he answered, a little irritated by the question. “If you forget your bags, then you just don’t shop or you carry the food in your arms.”

I still sometimes forget my bags, and usually I have too many items to carry in an improvised pouch when I do. I never decide to simply not shop. But if I lived in a country – or state – where I was forced to remember my bags or suffer the consequences, I would get used to the change.

And so I was looking forward to the implementation of SB 270, the new state law requiring shoppers to bring their own bags for grocery purchases or pay a 10-cent fee for each polyethylene or paper bag provided by the store. Paper bags lead to deforestation and an increase in greenhouse gases, but polyethylene bags were the impetus behind SB 270.

That’s because bringing cloth bags to the grocery store seems like a small inconvenience when one considers the environmental havoc wreaked by the trillion plastic bags used by consumers on Earth every year. Scientists estimate that each of those bags will float around our planet or clog up our landfills for up to one thousand years before they are fully decomposed.

Many of them will drift over to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex of garbage that spans an area of ocean from the coastal waters off Japan to the waters between California and Hawaii. Eventually, those bags, which are part of the plastic debris from the land that constitutes 80 percent of the garbage patch, will break up into microplastics. Sea turtles will mistake them for jellyfish and will die as a result of eating them.

It is my visualization of that garbage patch, which oceanographers describe as a “cloudy soup,” that has finally prompted me to keep my shopping bags in the truck of my car.

Sometimes I have a lot of bags, and when it’s 105 degrees outside in July or 40 degrees in January, I really don’t want to bring in the groceries and then go out to my car once again to store the bags in my trunk. If I am shopping at a bag-it-yourself grocery store, I find it is more difficult to put items in the oddly-sized bags that I have collected over the years than it is to pack them into a polyethylene bag.

And I hate folding my cloth bags and tucking them all into one another when I am done unpacking the groceries at home. I dislike shopping of any kind, and food shopping in particular, and I loathe adding to the tedium of the chore by creating yet more steps to the grocery-shopping process.

But then I think about what that vortex of garbage drifting off the coast of California will look like in one hundred years. I imagine just one leatherback sea turtle, 9 feet long and weighing 1,500 pounds, swimming into that vortex and swallowing a piece of the polyethylene bag I used to cart home my bread a century before.

Leatherbacks can claim ancestry that goes back 110 million years, but conservationists list them as endangered today. I do not wish to be one tiny link in a long chain that could lead to their eventual extinction. I think I can train myself to be just a little less lazy when I consider the very real effects my choices might have on that lone turtle.

When I was a kid, my dad used to brag to me about the beauty and power of California. He loved the variety of our landscapes, our political clout, and our reputation for progressiveness. I still believe in our power to influence the rest of the nation.

As the first state to require an alternative to the wide-spread use of plastic and paper bags, we have an opportunity to lead by example once again. Though 800,000 Californians recently signed a referendum to repeal SB 270, I’m counting on the 17 million registered voters in this state to uphold the bill in November 2016.

And until then, maybe we could think about that swirling vortex of plastic off of California’s shore as a reminder to bring our own bags when we shop.

This story was originally published January 2, 2015 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Plastic bags not worth the harm."