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Tom Jablonski's avatar

To Bag or Not to Bag.

Jay,

It was an interesting coincidence that I came across your Substack Post on Regenerative Lenses today that brought up the topic of “paper or plastic”? Yesterday I stopped at my local grocery store to pick up some eggs, but left my daughters old high school back pack home, which I typically bring with me to haul my stuff home in, thinking I could just carry the egg cartons home, and arrive with them mostly intact. I only live a few blocks from the grocery store and since I was planning on walking, I figured just carrying the cartons was the kindest thing I could do for the planet (I won’t get into the related tangential topic of whether to buy organic, free range, or take the plunge and start raising my own chickens, which would eliminate the need for the bag choice in the first place, but then again maybe I should go down that path?).

My guilt free plan became upset when the young woman packing my eggs at the checkout asked me if I wanted a paper or plastic bag. Since she already had the cartons in hand ready to deposit in the bag of my choosing, I panicked and succumbed to my default answer of plastic – since I recalled my hoard of plastic bags had recently been reduced by my well-intentioned wife who lives 1000 miles from me in a place where all bags cost 10 cents, so she took a bunch of my free stash bags that we have always reused for garbage disposal.

I had a brief discussion with the enthusiastic bagger woman about which is better, paper or plastic, and we both agreed that the ability to reuse plastic for other purposes, made the choice to use plastic relatively simple. I rambled on about how I should have just carried the eggs, but then explained the guilt I would have to live with based on my being to cheap to buy new garbage bags, and decided I better leave the store before I got kicked out for over thinking the bag thing.

The bottom line here I think is that what is important is not the material the bag is made of, that matters, nor even how many times the bag of choice is reused, or what materials and environmental impacts those choices result in. Rather, it gets back to a couple of items you addressed briefly in your newsletter. One being the idea that your proposed solution of calculating the most ethical bag comes from a mind set of looking at us as consumers and assuming at some point we need bags to carry our purchases in. You do touch on asking at one point do we really need what it is we are buying, but that is mostly just a side note in your discussion. I personally have given up on the idea that we can somehow do an evaluation of the impacts of all the products and services and then leave the store with the least evil of our choices. Such evaluations I have found are never complete, mostly depend on guessing about impacts, and in the end justify the continued world view where the planet is one big resource sink designed to satisfy our supposed insatiable desire for more and more stuff which we can keep doing if we just do so kindly.

For me the answer comes basically when we back up and ask what is it we really need, and what we really need we better be able to get the resources locally, and deal with any waste locally as well. Any attempts to make the global shit-show we have as our current economy kinder is basically just allowing a catastrophe to grow worse. If your interested, I wrote a piece that can be found here that talks more about what I think we really need.

https://placesiam.substack.com/p/no-thanks-to-happy-holidazed-all-i-want

In the mean time best of luck with retooling the Truly Ethical Businesses and don’t pay too much attention to naysayers like me.

Tom

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