I applaud places that charge for plastic bags. I’ve worked in retail for many years and seen how wasteful people can be. Sadly, many people don’t care more about a nickel than they do the environment.

I can only sit and shake my head at this statement. A company needs customers to survive. Treat your customers like they owe you something and they’ll leave. It is not a privilege for me to shop there. It’s a privilege for them to have me as a customer. They are not my parents or the government. They have no right to “penalize” me.

“The program is a fascinating case study in how incentives influence behaviour.”

Very fascinating. For example, Home Depot and Rona started charging for bags. I stopped shopping there and started shopping at smaller stores that still care about customer service. The end result is I’m probably paying more than I would of if I had just bought the bags, but my satisfaction is higher. HD and Rona lost a couple of thousand in profits to their competition because they wouldn’t give out a couple of dollars worth of bags.

The decline in customer service and companies’ arrogance gave me incentive to seek out their competitors. Or was that not their intention?

Once I have a house, I’ll be able to be greener because I’ll have more options open to me — like being able to compost!

For those who don’t know the difference, compostable and biodegradable are two completely different beasts.

Compostable items can break down into organic matter.
Sugar-based compostables do so faster than corn-based compostables. Paper and food are compostable. All compostables may go in your green compost bin. A (compostable) newspaper lining will save you money over plastic liners. You can also keep your compost and use it for your garden, which saves money on fertilizer. Either use an outdoor compost, or create a worm compost. (btw, worm composts don’t stink.)

Biodegradable just means it degrades. Biodegradable plastic just breaks down into small plastic molecules that are good for nothing but being small bits of plastic that easily move around the soil and potentially the water supply. Don’t waste money on this.

I have been using reusable bags for years to buy groceries. I still have a steady supply of plastic bags. I find I always have something to put my garbage in. Milk bags, cereal bags, fresh produce bags, bags that wrap that new thing you bought, bags your friend returned your stuff in… It’s also a good idea to use fewer bags. There are usually alternative places to put your waste (compost, recycle), and don’t typically buy products with lots of packaging (they’re often pricey).

An interesting note – conservation is something that saves your wallet as well as the environment. Being “green” could just as well be talking about those twenties you’ve been saving using “reduce” and “reuse”. (Both are far more important than “recycle”.

I mean seriously, how can you NOT care? I’m not suggesting you quit your job and go save the whales, but to not care at all?

But once they are thrown away by consumers, plastic bags can cause all kinds of environmental problems. Furthermore, these bags last around one thousand years in a landfill. At our current rate of consumption, this means that one thousand years from now our landfills will contain somewhere between 500 trillion (500,000,000,000,000) and one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) plastic bags. That sure is a lot of zeros, and a heck of a lot of bags.

As someone who has been using cloth shopping bags for over a decade, I am very happy that the government finally stepped in to ‘encourage’ people to do the right thing and not the lazy, easy alternative.

I don’t buy garbage bags. For those looking for alternatives: Milk comes in plastic bags as do many other products. Use these for trash. Place your small trash bags in a garbage bin. They don’t have to go in a big black garbage bag too. How many layers do you need to protect your waste?? If you run out of these sorts of plastic bags, buy the biodegradable bin-liner bags.

Biodegradable plastic bags are a scam. They don’t biodegrade completely – they just break down into small pieces which are eaten by animals.

You can even avoid bin liners by just using newspaper.

Come on people, if you applied half the imagination and effort that you do to PF to helping to greenify your lives, we could all make huge strides. It’s not that hard!

http://greenifyyourlifebook.blogspot.com/