Don't Call These Bags Garbage

You can have my plastic bags when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

Oh, I know my beloved plastic grocery bags aren't illegal … yet . But San Francisco recently voted to outlaw them. And in New York City, where I live, they just introduced a bill that would require any largish store to ask its customers to recycle the bags. Then the store would have to set up some recycling bins to actually take those bags, in all their post-roast chicken disgustingness, back.

Nothing wrong with that. Who doesn't like recycling? (Or chicken?) The only thing is: Don't most of us reuse our bags already ? Are we not a totally bag-dependent culture? The Inuit and their blubber this, blubber that have nothing on Americans and their plastic bags.

"I use them to line every bathroom garbage can. I double bag my Kitty Litter. I take them everywhere I go to collect snack garbage. And I always have one at the bottom of my purse," said my bag-besotted friend Wendi.

Who has not been thrilled to discover a scrunched-up sack just as he was trying to figure out what to do with the lunch, laundry or dirty diaper suddenly on hand? Who has not wrapped a plastic bag around a bottle of something he didn't want to explode inside his other bag, inside his other, other bag? In my apartment, we even use our grocery bags to take out the kitchen trash because anything bigger is impossible to shove down the incinerator chute. (Not that I haven't tried.)

"And is there not something poetic about watching a plastic bag whip across an asphalt parking lot, the urban equivalent of watching tumbleweed bounce across the prairie?" asked blogger Dan Collins.

Well … uh.

I'm not sure I'd go that far.

The fact is, when plastic bags are not cleverly reused by brilliant and thrifty types, they can spread a certain gloom. It's hard to enthuse about a bag stuck in a tree — something South Africans call their national flower. (In China, it's "white pollution.")

Environmentalists remind us that even when bags are disposed of properly, they will languish in landfills, leaching crud all the while. Yet if the bags escape — yikes! — "A bag floating in the water looks like a jellyfish, which for a lot of marine creatures, means it looks like lunch," a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Jon Coifman, said.

So it's true: Plastic bags are not an unmitigated blessing.

That's why the bill pending here in New York — and probably coming soon to a city near you — seems surprisingly smart. Unlike Ireland and Bangladesh and an increasing number of other places around the world, it does not seek to ban the bags outright. Instead, it would allow us to keep stockpiling them, if we're running low on garbage bags, but also to get rid of them responsibly if we've got so many that we can't shut the kitchen cabinet anymore and a husband is hollering, "What in God's name are you saving these for?"

With a new focus on the plastic bag's ubiquity, this type of law also may remind us that it makes sense to carry around a canvas tote bag, too, even though this adds about 30 years to one's appearance and automatically replaces whatever cute shoe was on your feet with sensible black sneakers (size wide).

Anyway, even with a sturdy tote, I know what I always will have tucked inside: America's answer to whale blubber.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at The New York Sun and Advertising Age. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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