Sunday evening, after returing from our holiday travels, my first errand was to pick up milk from our local grocery store. One of the nice things about living downtown is that there is a Publix grocery store only a few blocks from away. In fact yesterday I walked to the store and back … The green signs, at street level, say “remember to bring you bags”. You can see my shopping bags in the foreground. I wonder if this a common practice around the world … For our international visitors do you bring your groceries home in paper, plastic, or cloth? And how common is it to walk to the grocery store?
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Plastic shopping bags are actually banned in some areas. I began using cloth exclusively about a year ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_shopping_bag
There’s a grocery store conveniently located at walking distance from my home and I use a cloth bag made of organic cotton. In Holland most towns have grocery stores located throughout them, so most people can just walk to them. I guess it’s different from most US towns, where many stores are located on the outskirts of town and you simply have to drive.
In Paris recently, I noticed what a high percentage of customers at the Champion grocery store had brought their own bags (most were a sort of thick plastic). Then I realized the store charged extra if the customer had to use a store bag. System seemed to be working well. The reusable bags tend to be larger than those in the US, and that is useful if you are doing a week’s shopping.
I’d love to have reusable bags for shopping. Many stores are now offering these. The drawback, however, is that the bags simply are not big enough for those who don’t shop every day. For a week’s worth of groceries, I would need a lot of these small bags. Stores need to offer larger bags to encourage people to use the environmentally-friendly reusable ones. I have two that I purchased at Half Price Books in Dallas last year that are twice the size of those offered at Walmart, for instance. However, they are light-weight and might not hold heavy canned goods. While the prices are low in most cases for the resuable bags, if stores are seriously suggesting that their customers use these, they might consider giving one to a customer each time that customer spends X amount of dollars at their business.
In the UK they are starting to ban “Free” plastic bags, stores sell bags for life, thicker and bigger bags which, when the are damaged, are replaced by the store free of charge. This same system has been used in France for a few years now. I use mainly cloth bags with a few of these “free for Live” bags as extras for a big shop, I also have two large Trolly bags which are a bit too large to lift out of the trolly and into the car if they have heavy goods in them. Also only used for larger shopping trips. I try to walk to the local store as much as I can and sometimes use a shopping trolly, if I need more than I think I can carry. This makes me feel like and old lady and I don’t think I am yet, as I have a few years to go till I get to 60….