wrapper nation

Have you ever taken a look at the amount of wrapping we do? Buy some Orowheat bread at Costco and you will find not one but three wrappings. First there is the big bag, and because it carries the bar code that the cashier needs, you cannot leave it behind. In it you stuff two loaves, each wrapped in another bag. Then inside that bag, there is a shrink-wrap type plastic sheet that surrounds the bread itself. I am done buying Orowheat. 

I am not sure why bread gets wrapped in the first place. It is not as if nobody touches the loaf. If you do not want to eat a loaf that others touched, you better not eat bread. When I was a kid we would go to the bakery and buy bread. It was always handed to us bare-handed, no bag or anything. These days people insist bakery shop workers wear latex exam gloves to handle bread. Our local baker would have fallen over laughing at such idiocy. If you really thought he never touched the bread, you must be from Mars.

We carried our bread, all exposed in a little net-like shopping bag that was reused until it literally fell apart. Years later "progress" appeared and the bakery acquired a bread slicer. Now they had to bag the bread lest if fall apart. Today, nearly all bread is pre-sliced. It is a bad idea really as the bread spoils faster, is easier to consume, and deprives people of some much needed exercise. The industrial bakeries think it is all improvement. The more bread gets eaten or spoils, the more they can sell.

Wrapping and bagging has become so second-nature, one has to be super-aware when shopping. It is not enough to bring your own shopping bags. Plastic baggies are everywhere. Veggies are all individually bagged, otherwise the check stand people get confused. There is also no way to keep items like apples together on the roller band they have, plus it annoys the checkout folks if your oranges roll away.

If you really want to save on packaging, I recommend that you use the self-checkout stands that are now popping up everywhere. Here you can actually place bananas and apples on the scale yourself, and then pop them in your re-usable bag, without ever needing one of those plastic baggies that nobody can do without.

Check stand people have other bad habits. I am sure management contributes to these because so many of them seem to do it almost without thinking.  They routinely put meat -which is already packaged in styrofoam with plastic top- in a little plastic bag, and some even put ice-cream containers in plastic before they add it to your shopping bag. Bagamania at the supermarket. One more reason to avoid supermarkets whenever you can.

In my experience only the folks at Whole Foods seem to care and are responsive and attentive to less bagging. At other stores, one frequently has to fight personnel to stop crazy wrapping. At the very least you get dirty looks for being a non-conformist.

infrastructure

We often neglect to see how infrastructure plays a key role in environmental protection. If you live in a low-density suburb you are going to pollute a lot more than people living in a city. A lot more. And there is very little you can do about it. Your whole life-style is a polluting nightmare.

First off, you have to drive everywhere. Because there is nothing to do in your suburb but sleep and watch TV, you need to drive all the time. You drive to work, to school, to the gym, to the stores. Because your house is stand-alone, and likely way too big -as that is the main attraction of suburbia- you need to buy more goodies to fill it up. (People always fill their houses to capacity no matter what the size).

You also need to heat your mansion more in winter and cool it more in summer. Because your neighborhood home-owners association enforces it, you likely need to keep a useless green lawn and waste tons of water on it. Furthermore, you need to mow it regularly spewing out inordinate amounts of greenhouse gases.

Second, you cannot easily change this pattern. It is built-into your life-style. You cannot really walk to the store even if you wanted to, because there is no store, and because it probably isn't safe to walk outside of your development. There are no side-walks, only wide streets with people driving SUV's at very high speeds.

Believe it or not, but infrastructure is foiling elegant solutions like re-usable shopping bags. Today's WSJ has a long article entitled "An Inconvenient Bag." They discuss the failure of the reusable shopping bag. They highlight how stores like Walmart and Home Depot have given out millions of free bags. Bags that cost a lot more to produce, generate more pollution, and take up more space than the ubiquitous evil plastic "t-shirt" bag we all use. 

The problem, we are told is that people do not reuse the bag. And it is easy to see why. Such bags do not mesh with suburban shopping habits, where people drive to the store a few times a week and load up. A reusable shopping bag works best for an urban user who walks to the store everyday to pick up necessities for just that day.

When you get to your regular supermarket, you need a cart. You will haul so much heavy stuff that you do need the cart. Instead of shopping with your bag as city dwellers would, you need to put your bags in the cart. It is easy to forget. It is also inconvenient as you don't know how many bags you will need.

Then when you get the bags home and unload them you need to remember to put them back in the car for your next trip. Even with your bag, items come with so much wrapping that your gains are rather minimal. Unless you can put your veggies straight in your re-usable bag -which does not work easily and which some shops won't let you do- you will need tear-off plastic bags in any case.

I am afraid these partial "solutions" do more harm than good. What Walmart and Home Depot and others should do, is sell bags. Make people pay. The more people pay the less they consume and the less waste there is. That unfortunately goes against the whole supermarket philosophy. But then again, as yesterday's WSJ hinted at, shopping at supermarkets does not really save you money. It just makes you consume and waste more. The excess far exceeds your meager savings, and you would be better off buying less, better quality, items at your local grocer.

You would spend the same amount, but be leaner, healthier, and less wasteful. You would also support a sustainable and sensible infrastructure.

forty billion per year

No, this is not how much money Bill Gates makes. It is how many empty plastic water bottles we Americans dump into landfills every year. Forty billion bottles per year or better than 100 million per day. To say nothing of all the energy wasted shipping that water.

Bottled water is one of the biggest environmental disasters on the planet. The amount of energy spent bottling water, shipping it, cooling it, and ultimately trucking off the empties is just mind-boggling. And all that for what is often an inferior product. Time and time again, research has shown that municipal drinking water is of better quality, has less contaminants, and less bacteria than bottled water.

Water has many desired properties, but when it comes to bottled versions these properties work against us. Water is heavy. Shipping water consumes a lot of energy because water is so heavy. Water also has an enormous heat capacity. It takes a lot of energy to heat or cool water. Water is also a great medium for life and water in little bottles is easily contaminated. With no flow to wash it away, that contamination can quickly take over the whole bottle.

Perhaps you should think about all that before you grab that next water.