Reusable shopping bags help reduce carbon footprint

Plastic shopping bags are everywhere in the United States — everywhere expect cities such as San Francisco, which has come up with a way to cut back on the number bags making it into landfills.

San Francisco passed legislation April 10, 2007, to ban the use of non-compostable plastic bags from checkout registers throughout the city.

The city was one of the first in the United States to join the ranks of cities and countries around the world trying to reduce landfill waste and dependency on oil by cutting the bags from the marketplace.

“China just banned plastic bags, and it is going to save them 30 million barrels of oil,” said John Ramsburgh, director of the S.C. Chapter of the Sierra Club. “One of the things we need to be aware of is that plastic is a petroleum-based product and the continued use of plastic bags increases our dependence on foreign oil.”

But Tom Shearin, director of Keep Florence Beautiful, said it doesn’t make good economic sense to ban plastic bags.

“Unfortunately, plastic bags are inexpensive. That’s why retailers use them,” he said. “As far as Keep Florence Beautiful goes, we’ve been (working toward) recycling (bags).”

The issue is doubly important in the Pee Dee. Hilex Poly Co., located in Hartsville, is one of the leading manufacturers of plastic bags in America, producing 34 billion plastic bags annually.

David Pastrich, president and CEO of the company, said many cities are looking into developing recycling programs, as opposed to banning plastic bags, to accommodate the number of bags used by consumers each day.

Mark Daniels, vice president of marketing and environmental affairs for Hilex, the recycling program offered by Hilex will change the way people see the bags.

“We are asking customers to accept a change in the color of the bags from a white bag to a gray or bronze bag,” he said. “We can then make a bag that is gray and have a lot more recycled material in it.”

This year, Hilex estimates it will recycle roughly 12 million pounds of plastic products.

Pastrich said despite the continued efforts of the company to decrease its carbon footprint, making plastic bags remains a line of work hated by many environmentalists.
“It’s become the whipping boy for most environmental activists,” he said.

The problem with the degradation of the bags is partly because of the way landfills are designed, Pastrich said.

“If you take a banana peel and you entomb it in a landfill without oxygen and sunlight, it’s going to last just as long as a plastic bag,” he said.

A few facts about plastic shopping bags and recycling from the Sierra Club:

• Reusing a bag meant for just one use has a big impact. A sturdy, reusable bag needs only be used 11 times to have a lower environmental impact than using 11 disposable plastic bags.
  
• In New York City alone, one less grocery bag per person per year would reduce waste by 109 tons and save $11,000 in disposal costs.
  
• Plastic bags carry 80 percent of the nation’s groceries, up from 5 percent in 1982.
  
• When one ton of plastic bags is reused or recycled, the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil is saved.