Remember when BYOB meant Bring Your Own Booze or maybe Bring Your Own Beer - depending on how fiscally advanced your friends were? Now it’s way more boring. It means Bring Your Own Bag.
Originally, BYOB was invented to help keep your buddies out of the poor house when you all wanted to get drunk together. The current purpose? Lining the pockets of grocery store magnates. Oh sure five cents for a plastic bag is nothing. After all, what else can you do with a nickel these days? Penny candy costs ten cents! And, yes, even a whole bunch of grocery bags is only going to set you back fifty or sixty cents. But that’s not the point. I don’t think grocery stores are buying those bags for five cents each, so I smell profit being cooked up. In fact, now that we have the Internet, and nothing can be kept secret, I’ve discovered that those bags cost way less than one cent each. So that’s at least 400% profit on every bag sold. With a money-making scheme like that, grocery stores will probably stop bothering to pedal food at all.
Customers are only too happy to pay for those bags, figuring that they’re helping the environment. But…if I previously required ten bags to bring home my groceries, and now I need ten bags plus 50 cents to bring home my groceries, how am I helping the environment? In fact, I have consumed even more resources with this method. Somebody had to mine/smelt/manufacture/transport those coins I used as payment, or invent and supervise the cyberworld required to process the equivalent digital transactions. And they all drove to work in their SUV’s.
So, in my desperate attempt to help the environment, I am now transporting ratty moth-eaten plastic bags in my purse, pockets, and under my bra strap - so that I can save a few nickels. Frankly, it makes me feel cheap. But if I buy the bags I feel un-green. I also suspect that I’ve been mercilessly gouged by corporations that have figured out how to squeeze a few more shekels out of the environmentally guilt-ridden.
Cloth bags would seem to be the ultimate solution. So… in addition to used plastic bags, I tote my largish collection of reusable bags with me everywhere I go. They’re much bulkier and can’t be stuck into convenient nooks and crannies like the plastic ones.
The grocery moguls expressed their concern for the environment by helpfully selling me the cloth bags at a dollar a piece. They would like me to use them for a long time, but not too long a time. I can tell this because while they are made of cloth, they’re not washing machine friendly. A few rounds in the washer and they’ve become pathetically bearded with lint balls. Oh well. At least I can’t see the E. coli frolicking in last week’s meat juice/produce nectar.
But still I worry. While I’m not wasting plastic by bringing home an estimated 1000 bags per year, I am sucking up energy by putting them through the wash. So, basically, trying to be green is a painful equation that can never be satisfactorily balanced.
Of course I could always give up buying food altogether.
