Today I officially took a first step in my going green endeavor. I passed up the plastic grocery bags and used my own brand-new reusable bags at the grocery store. It all started when I ran across a post on Envirosax. The author challenged me to forgo plastic and commit to using reusable bags. She even offered a free bag to anyone who made the commitment.
Of course I had known that I should do this for some time, but… My problem was that the grocery stores all sell bags (at very low prices) with their advertising on them. Well, I regularly shop at three different stores. I don’t want to go into one store with bags from another store. And I certainly don’t want to carry three sets of bags! But in this blog, the author gave the addresses of websites that sell reusable bags without advertising from my local grocery stores. That plus the offer of the free bag was enough to push me off the fence. So after a little research, I bought 10 bags from Bags on the Run for about $25. Plus I got the one free bag for promising to go green.
When the bags arrived, my kids were thrilled. It’s not easy to do something right in the eyes of your teenagers, so I considered this a major victory.
But the first time I went to the store, I forgot and left the bags in the car. This isn’t going to be easy. Old habits die hard. But tonight I stopped at the store for ‘just a few things’ and I remembered the bags. They’re bigger than plastic grocery bags and they hold their shape better. There’s a flat panel at the bottom that helps. The cashier and the box person didn’t look twice, so I must not be the only person skipping the plastic. So I’m on my way to going green – very slowly.
And I’ll never tell my kids that when I worked at the grocery store 100 years ago I used to double bag heavy groceries – in paper.