From the New York Times: Even Reusable Bags Carry Environmental Risk
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
They dangle from the arms of many New Yorkers, a nearly ubiquitous emblem of empathy with the environment: synthetic, reusable grocery bags, another must-have accessory for the socially conscious.
But the bags, hot items at upscale markets, may be on the verge of a glacier-size public relations problem: similar bags outside the city have been found to contain lead.
“They say plastic bags are bad; now they say these are bad. What’s worse?” asked Jen Bluestein, who was walking out of Trader Joe’s on the Upper West Side with a reusable bag under her arm on Sunday.
“Green is a trend and people go with trends,” Ms. Bluestein said. “People get them as fashion statements and they have, like, 50 of them. I don’t think people know the real facts.”
There is no evidence that these bags pose an immediate threat to the public, and none of the bags sold by New York City’s best-known grocery stores have been implicated. But reports from around the country have trickled in recently about reusable bags, mostly made in China, that contained potentially unsafe levels of lead. The offending bags were identified at several stores, including some CVS pharmacies; the Rochester-based Wegman’s grocery chain recalled thousands of its bags, made of recycled plastic, in September.
Concerns have proliferated so much that Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, sent a letter on Sunday to the Food and Drug Administration, urging the agency to investigate the issue.
…
Climate-change-conscious shoppers at one of Manhattan’s culinary meccas on Sunday said they were chagrined that yet another good intention had gone awry.
“Bummer! We’re still not doing the right thing,” said Shelley Kempner of Queens, who was looking over the produce at Fairway on Broadway at West 74th Street. She prefers a reusable bag, she said, because she “likes the idea of not putting more plastic into the environment.”
Read entire article here h/t to Tom Nelson
George Carlin was prescient in his view of plastic bags:
I always ask for plastic AND paper. I accumulate the ones I do not need and burn them outside in my burn pile, along with plastic bottles, etc. This way there is no disposal problem and any bacteria are killed in the fire. A side benefit is the generation of CO2 to benefit the plants.
By the way, Cadmium is also a neurotoxin, even more potent than lead.
Envirosocialists makes a dent in the policy department and what do you get but green fluffy stuff being produced that uses more toxic crap in its production and emits more toxic crap then the old toxic crap that was scrapped decades earlier for being too toxic.
And it’s all produced with the greenest blessings and award of all the hippie-policy-makers got to give, other people’s money by subsidizes by taxes.
Plastic bags: I use them as garbage bags, so I don’t have to *buy* them. Therefore, I shop exclusively at stores that still hand them out with no charge and I boycott the other ones. Voting with my wallet that is.
Lead is a natural part of the planet. Love the planet, love its lead! Lead is your best friend against evil man-made nuclear.
BS Footprint says:
November 15, 2010 at 9:56 am
“She knows that people are easily led,[…]”
Led! Make that “lead”. BRUAHAHAHA…
“There have been a number of reports on reusable [cloth] bags testing positive for dangerous bacteria, including E-coli, because of owners too dense or lazy to wash and bleach them between uses. ”
BLEACH??? Bleach??? The very idea of using bleach will bring all the eco-warriers down on you like a ton of bricks.
Having said that, I am still using two large, but very tattered, re-usable bags from an Irish supermarket that I bought three and a half years ago. Bleach would finish them off. I use biodegradeable nappy sacks for collecting dog poo and they make lovely handwarmers (joke!) when out walking the dog in this freezing weather. On QI the other evening Stephen Fry was dishing out facts about the CO2 emissions of dogs being equal to emissions from Toyota Landcruisers. Bill Bailey (comedian) was ecstatic that his 4 dogs, 2 cats, numerous birds and guinea pigs seemed to entitle him to about 3 landcruisers – very funny.
I just shrugged. Unless they are eating or smoking their bags, there should be zero risk. If someone complains that they could get lead poisoning from eating fruits or veggies carried in the bag, how? I mean they washed them before eating them, right? If the answer was no, they are far more likely to have health issues related to all the people fondling those foods before they picked them up or at the cashier. Then they even may get contaminated by that raw chicken that was on the belt 2 shoppers ago.
Me, I love the plastic bags. Super H (H Mart) has the best ones that have not been thinned to the point of uselessness. We recycle them or use them as trash can liners. They even work great for cleaning the cat box. That is something I just would not do with a reusable bag. 🙂
pablo an ex pat says:
November 15, 2010 at 9:22 am
I won’t have Chinese made consumer products in my house.
Do you keep your computer at someone else’s house?
Another good intention gone awry. How about another nutty idea gone awry.
Paper and plastic bags are just fine and I reuse them for other purposes and it is not to choke a fish or duck. . A grocery store cannot use old boxes for food products so why should we use an old bag over and over again.
I am old enough to remember when plastic bags were pushed onto us by environmentalists as a way to save ‘X’ million trees/year…
bubbagyro says: at 10:12 am
I always ask for plastic AND paper. I accumulate the ones I do not need and burn them outside in my burn pile, along with plastic bottles, etc.
That is not a good idea and where I live it is against the law. Look up burning plastic on the web. Lots of hits. If you do burn the stuff, don’t breath and also, ask your neighbors upwind not to burn any.
Hey, ho…
I always use plastic bags to line small rubbish bins(that’s trash bins to you lot over the herring pond) – and as they are biodegradeable they will break down once they get on the landfill site – UNLIKE ‘proper’ bin liners, which you buy on a roll – so MUST stay together long enough for you to use them all..!
This story is like the light bulb saga – all those well-informed politicians forcing us to dump ordinary light bulbs in favour of horrible ‘low energy’ ones – which of course are just coiled-up fluorescents, so contain mercury – and in any case have been superceded by LEDs which last forever and consume about one-tenth of the energy of the so-called low energy ones. Here in the UK the big stores are practically giving them away… So much for well-informed politicians…
gnomish says:
November 15, 2010 at 9:40 am
“Now, if plastic bags never deteriorate in the landfill, doesn’t that just fit the bill for sequestering carbon?”
That’s one of those anti-intuitive things people just don’t get about the environment. Ask any person on the street what’s bad about plastic bags, and they will invariably say “they stay around for 10,000 years!”
To which, the reply is, “don’t you realize how awesomely wonderful that is? You throw it away, and it stays thrown away, not leaching toxins into groundwater or breeding killer germs or feeding vermin or anything!”
Plastic bags are the most wonderful, Green with a capital “G” invention of the century. They take very little energy to manufacture or ship, because they are so lightweight. They don’t require bleaching agents or large amounts of waste water. And, as others have noted, they can have so many other uses before being discarded. They’re fantastic! The inventors should get a Nobel prize. Them, and the guys who figured out how to make stable, wheeled luggage.
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Mark in Sandy Eggo
November 15, 2010 at 9:14 am
In this case, the character Ellen Goode, is at local “One World” grocery store, and she forgot her eco bag. As she is at the checkout line, and everyone is staring at her as she mentally runs through all the evils of paper bags and the evils of plastic bags, she does a great pivot, and says she will just carry them in her hands. She doesn’t use eco bags anymore, since they are made by slave labor in China.
#
I will never be able to look at those stupid “vanity bags” again without thinking of this scene and giggling. It had to have been one of the funniest things on TV in a long time.
“Load me up!”
Thanks for the George Carlin. I’d read the Maldives post first, then this plastic bag post and it all just felt like a full-on frontal assalt from the forces of insanity. GC restored my mental balance. I’d seen most of the material before but the timing made it the perfect antidote to my being close to boiling point with the utter insanity we see around us in public life all the time with regard to AGW and the public’s reaction to being brainwashed about it. Yes, brainwashed about the issue, not educated. Thank goodness for people like the late George Carlin.
Look on the bright side. At least the lead will protect you from the radiation from cell phone masts.
Funny, I still have cotton bags that are 20 years old from Germany. Every supermarket had them for sale as well as the plastic ones. No lead in them, just wash them every now and again.
The real plastic problem isn’t in the US or Europe, it’s in the third world where every item purchased must be stapled in a plastic bag—or if it is too big, have a plastic bag stapled around it. Those bags can’t be reused. They also can’t be refused, so if a person is buying an item for immediate use–like a candy bar..they just walk outside and toss it.
@ur momisugly Anton – “Many surveys over the years have shown that self-identified liberals, who tend to favor fads, are in general far less hygienic than other Western demographic groups.”
Now, there’s some “surveys” I must read. Can you provide links or details, please?
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/hip_ecobags.jpg
I hadn’t read the wording on those bags until now.
That’s exactly what exacerbates my exasperation: people buying into absolute BS because they’ve been brainwashed into doing it, by the TV (mainly, these days). They haven’t thought about it. Nobody needs to think these days – the TV tells them what to think.
John F. Hultquist says:
November 15, 2010 at 10:57 am
Polyethylene burns much, much cleaner than wood or paper. Some plastics are toxic to burn, so a little homework is necessary. In most of the world, dung is burned. If it against the law to burn where one lives, one can move or change the law.
This reminds me of the eco-freaks in California who do not burn underbrush because it is illegal. Then they complain when the fire, which could have been obviated by controlled burning, is consuming their houses and loved ones, and the firefighters are not fast enough.
Interesting point to consider: Smokey the Bear used to say, “Only you can prevent Forest Fires”. Now he says, “Wildfires”. Why? Because the Eco-Freaks had told us for years that all fires were bad. They got all burning outlawed. Research then showed and proved that many pines, like Bristlecones, could not reproduce without fire, and in Yellowstone, that fires were necessary for Buffaloes to prosper. The Native Americans knew the value of fire in managing the prairies. Now the US Forest Service, after many environmental and personal catastrophes, does controlled burns (but not in CA—maybe the state would be better off razed, they must think, I don’t know).
So don’t tell us what is legal. We get to decide that. Unfortunately, many laws are based on ignorance and emotion, something the Eco-freaks are full of, it seems.
MattN; and the real kicker is that the trees that are used to make the paper bags grown specifically for that purpose, ie. to be made into paper. St. Regis, Mead, and other paper companies in the US own millions of acres of forests specifically cultivated for harvesting, like a corn crop only longer. Trees are a real renewable resource but the greens always try to make it sound like they’re harvesting The Forest Primevael to make paper and other wood products.
Sometimes I think that if half the people who use reusable bags knew what they were buying into , they’d stop using them . I’ve come to view using plastic bags as a form of protest . My wife advocates paper , mainly because she occasionly receives royalties from the sale of slash pine used in pulp mills .
DaveF says:
November 15, 2010 at 10:12 am
Here in the UK the major supermarket chain, Tesco, now gives you very thin, biodegradeable plastic bags. They biodegrade so fast you’ve a job to get your shopping home before they’re in bits! That’s progress, I suppose.
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My friend at work was moving desk – after only a few months. He was cleaning out his desk and the boss noticed all the seemingly shredded up plastic. She thought it must have been a mouse until a couple of people piped up that we’d noticed this with the new, ‘bio-degradable’ Tesco bags. They probably use some carcinogenic chemical to make them bio-degradable.
Great eh? Progress? No.
Surely any kind of plastic bag must be carbon-positive as crude oil provides the main constituent of plastic. Sisal or hemp bags make good sense, They are tough, washable
easily grown on marginal land, low-energy, low-technology, low start-up costs and provide a use for machetes other than chopping up the inhabitants next village. I would have thought the eco-freaks would be all over the idea.