It’s time for BYOB! Yes, bring your own shopping bag!  While we keep on our journey through a busy 2010, it’s outrageous to think about how much shopping we traditionally do now in America and world-wide. Whether it’s everyday visits into the supermarket as we keep our kitchen’s stocked for wonderful meals and tasty goodies or those sometimes dreaded (yet skillful) “6 bags on each arm” walks through the local shopping mall, it all adds up to so much needless waste.  Probably the most blatant examples of this waste is disposable grocery bags.

An estimated 100 billion plastic shopping bags are used each year within the USA, according to the Wall-Street Journal.  Most plastic bags end up in landfills and the rest time and again end up in rivers, ponds, lakes, streams or in the sea, where animals can swallow or become entangled in them.  Considering the number of shopping bags that are consumed and wasted each year, the time is now to spread the word about the constructive benefits of eco friendly reusable shopping bags.  After all, the majority of us desire to give back to our families, friends and communities as often as possible.

Creating a BYOB approach in our individual shopping habits is a straightforward method to do exactly that.  If we can raise consciousness at this time, the positive outcome for our environment is incalculable for 2010 and well into the future.  Quite a few metropolitan areas have already made gradual but significant progress in endorsing the usage of eco shopping bags   in recent years.  Encouraging consumers with plastic and paper bag bans, discounts at the register for reusable bag usage and tax motivations are a few to speak of.

Right here in America, the San Jose City Council only just approved one of the nation’s strictest bans on plastic and paper shopping bags.   It is a big victory for the Bay Area, that has 1 million plastic bags per year accumulating in and along the San Francisco Bay.  San Jose becomes the latest bay area town to enact some sort of ban on disposable shopping bags; others include San Francisco and Palo Alto. Tracy Seipel of the San Jose Mercury News reported that it was actually ONE man who truly jump-started the ban, an additional remarkable instance of the power of one person.  Here’s a an excerpt:

“While visiting his sister-in-law in Taipei, (Kansen) Chu (elected to San Jose city council in 2007) went grocery shopping and was surprised to get charged for plastic grocery bags. The next day, he brought his own cloth bags back to the store.  “I guess the question,” said Chu, “was, ‘Why not San Jose?’ ” He began a conversation with the city’s environmental services staff, which later moved to council committee discussions.

Save the Bay’s 4th annual report on the most garbage-strewn sites in the region further demonstrates the need for BYOB.  The 50-year-old environmental advocacy group focused on 10 explicit bay-area sites where almost 15,000 plastic bags were retrieved in a single day last year in their statement.   Here’s an extract of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kelly Zito.

According to (Save the Bay’s) research, Californians use about 19 billion plastic bags each year, 3.8 million in the Bay Area. The average use time for the bags – made using about 12 million barrels of oil each year in the United States – is about 12 minutes. In addition to the hundreds of years it can take for a plastic bag to decompose in a landfill, the bags also force downtime when fed into traditional recycling equipment. Typically, the bags get wound into conveyor belts or gears and must be cut out by hand.

Ten US cities have banned plastic bags to date, five throughout the past year. Even Mexico City enacted a ban on plastic shopping bags, which went into effect in August.  The city of 20 million at this moment faces the realities of effective enforcement, which isn’t easy while the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce estimates there’s 35,000 vendors in Mexico City’s downtown vicinity alone.

Bans on plastic bags aren’t the only helpful approach to scale back destructive waste caused by disposable bags.  PlasTaxes, which tax consumers at the register for using plastic bags while shopping, were first launched by the Irish.  John Roach of National Geographic reported in 2008 about the worldwide momentum that’s been building because Ireland instituted a PlasTax in 2003.  The Irish confirmed they could decrease plastic bag utilization by 90% or more.   Momentum is increasing the world over, particularly in America.  From Washington, DC to Edmonds, WA to North Pole, AK, communities and governments are creating a global trend to cut back the damaging environmental effects of disposable shopping bags.  In the great state of Hawaii, the legislature is currently taking into account a bill to ban single-use plastic bags (SUP), or to establish a minimal fee to utilize SUP bags.

Even chief retail stores like Target and CVS are taking action by enacting savings at the register for customers who decide to BYOB or just carry-out their items without a bag.  For those naysayers, it’s opportune to ignore recent momentum in reducing disposable bag waste.  But to a few, the wide-spread adoption of eco-friendly green shopping bags is inevitable.  Look at the way smoking is becoming taboo in America.  Indoor smoking bans have caught on like wild-fire.  In a similar way, who is to say the use of disposable bags won’t become taboo one day within the (hopefully near) future?  The use of eco-friendly recycled grocery bags is definitely gaining steam.  Our personal choices to bring our recycled shopping bags can go much farther than we think.  That’s what BYOB is all about.

Of course, plastic and paper bags should be recycled and it’s crucial to take into account a bunch of huge retailers including Albertsons and Wal-Mart will recycle plastic bags for you (just need to bring them your accumulated stash).  That being said, a BYOB shopping plan can make your life so much simpler because there isn’t a need to accumulate that cupboard full of plastic bags or determine what and when to deal with it.  Keeping a few eco bags inside your car or backpack is a good way to ensure you possess them when required. Thus give back this year by remembering to BYOB!   Whether it be in a convenience store, the mall, or while grocery shopping, we could make a change for our environment and help raise knowledge one transaction at a time.  For the battle to eliminate disposable shopping bag waste, 2010 is our moment.