My Closet’s Full of Reusable Bags, But So Is The Landfill

Big Grocery’s New Scam Guilts Americans Through Climate Change Action as 24,000 Private Jets Roam the Skies

Something strange is going on with humanity. No, I’m not talking about … shit. I don’t even know where to start that list. It would be as long as a novel. Private jets seem like a good place to start. There’s about 24,000 of them on the planet. Not counting UFOs. I said what I said. I’ll never say UAPs. In a study released in June, the International Council on Clean Transportation “estimated that private jets produced up to 19.5 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, a 25% increase over the past decade and accounting for nearly 4% of all civil aviation emissions at their post-COVID peak.”

Yikes.

If there were no private jets, we could lower whatever civil aviation emissions are by 4%? That’s give or take, it could be significantly higher. Maybe even lower. Perhaps grounding private jets would help our atmosphere by limiting 24,000 people to benefit 8.2 billion human beings.

I’m not here to talk about that. Let’s go bigger. That’s right. Don’t be distracted. Something too many Americans struggle with every single day.

Reusable bags at the grocery store.

Hate them? Me too. Reusable bags will never replace plastic bags’ ability to catch trash in a small garbage can, though. Even those fancy ones at the affluent grocery stores.

I can only describe living in the Garden State, but I’m sure there are similar experiences around the country. The banning of plastic bags has had a crippling effect on my wallet and coat closet. I’ve got a home filled with reusable grocery bags and the pile keeps growing. They’re hidden at the bottom of the closet, hidden, packed in like contraband, I tell no one about it. They’re taking the place of my plastic bags, but it’s not the same.

I never thought I was a hoarder, but now, I’m second guessing it. I want to throw these reusable bags away, but I can’t find make myself. I paid for them. I’ll use them for something. It’s not like they are useless.

It’s been a few years since plastic bags were banned and I still can’t remember to bring reusable bags with me to the store. I either have none in my car (see closet) or forget to grab them from my car on my way into the store. By the time I realize I’m going in naked, I justify the extra couple bucks to buy another reusable bag. Damn my human laziness. Someday I’ll reuse the reusable bag at the store. I promised myself I would next time I go to the store, but I’ve said that the last thirty times, too.

Although recently, the reusable bags are becoming sturdier and decorated with art for the appropriate season. And the price? They’re closer to two dollars than one. Someone’s gotta pay for the bag’s design. The shopper will foot the bill. Like always.

How did this happen?

Well, I have a theory.

Big Grocery.

Rather than price hikes on avocados or fancy bottled water (a once upon a time free item, water that is), Big Grocery decided to ban plastic bags and replace them with ‘eco-friendly’ reusable ones. Buy them for a dime, sell them for a dollar. More profits for stores across the country. Cue the evil laughter.

The worst part of these reusable bags? Besides the fact some of these bags have a worse carbon footprint than plastic bags? No one is reusing the reusable bags. (Suddenly, my Big Grocery conspiracy theory has some legs. Or perhaps it’s Big Manufacturing behind this.)

Since the banning of plastic bags, a free item made in the billions per day, my grocery bill has grown a couple dollars per trip to the store. Sure, plastic bags take a thousand years to disintegrate, but I won’t be here for that long, why should I care? The diversity of plastic bags exceeds reusable bags. In fact, someone should conduct a study on that. I bet plastic bags are reused a hundred times more than reusable bags. I don’t care how stores dress up their reusable bags, they’ll never be as comforting and useful as a plastic one.

But it’ll never work. The bags have been banned. The reign of plastic is coming to an end. One day I’ll reach for a plastic bag in my plastic bag full of plastic bags and I’ll come up empty. All that will be left is the plastic bag that held the plastic bags. That’s always the last one to go. When this happened before, a trip to the store would replenish my stockpile. Never again. Soon plastic bags will go extinct. At least for me. Which isn’t fair.

The lifecycle of all plastics is responsible for 3.4% to global greenhouse gas emissions. Plastic bags are only a small portion of that. Why do they have to go, but private jets, which are responsible for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions and benefit an impressive 0.0003% of the world’s population, are allowed to stay?