It’ll take more than bags to cure environment’s ills

It’s made in China. It looks like cloth, but when I put on reading glasses and find the tag, I see it’s 100 percent polypropylene.

That’s plastic. Polypropylene is made from crude oil. Between drilling for petroleum and making polypropylene for consumer use, there’s about an eight-step process.

Anyway, from now on, when grocery checkers ask “paper or plastic?” I won’t have to feel guilty. Not if I remember to bring my new cloth lookalike (but actually 100 percent polypropylene) bags. I bought several of them Tuesday at the Fred Meyer store in south Everett, which sells two sizes of black, reusable bags for 89 cents or 99 cents each.

Decorated with khaki-­colored fruit and vegetable graphics, they’re nice and earthy looking. Polypropylene or not — and green or not — they’ll keep dirty looks at bay as common plastic and paper shopping bags become ever more costly and politically incorrect.

Snohomish County isn’t there yet, but come Jan. 1, Seattle shoppers will be charged 20 cents for each disposable plastic or paper bag they get at grocery, convenience and drug stores. The Seattle City Council approved the charge Monday, along with a ban on foam food and drink containers.

Carrying reusable bags is absolutely a good habit to cultivate. I’d still need some disposable bags for garbage, and to pick up after my dog, but sure, we should all take steps to reuse and recycle as much as we can.

I’m not sold, though, on the 20-cent solution. If Seattle wants to push reuse — to a population that I’m guessing is quite willing to try — wouldn’t a nickel or a dime per bag send the same message? As many families pinch every penny, the 20-cent fee seems overly punitive.

“I won’t shop there,” said Chris Clark of Everett who was loading plastic-bagged merchandise into her car at an Everett store Tuesday. “I use these as garbage bags. I’m from England, where we used to have to have our own bags,” she said in a distinctly British accent. “To me, we should have a choice.”

Not everyone shares Clark’s view. Cheryl Fontaine, who lives near Lake Stevens, believes Seattle’s bag charge is past due. “This is the first time (Seattle Mayor) Greg Nickels has done something I approve of,” Fontaine wrote in a comment about Seattle’s bag measure posted in response to The Herald’s Eco Geek blog. She posted her views in April, after Nickels and Seattle City Council President Richard Conlin proposed the fee.

“All we have to do is work on the mindset to remember to carry some bags with us to the store,” Fontaine wrote. “Fancy designer bags at $15 each are totally unnecessary, as a trip to any grocery store will prove.”

Fontaine said Monday that she’s made a habit of keeping reusable bags handy. “I must have about nine bags in my car,” she said. A gardener, she throws much of her kitchen waste on a compost pile. “My family has never been real throw-away,” she said. “My grandma would always reuse bags and aluminum foil. That wasn’t so old-fashioned after all. It made sense.”

It was easy to find shoppers who agree it’s time for change.

Everett’s Lisa Gordon keeps reusable bags in her car. Esther Smith, who was also shopping in Everett on Tuesday, avoids plastic altogether. Her choice is paper, which doesn’t last forever.

Holding my made-in-China, 100 percent polypropylene bag in my hands, I’m having a hard time believing it’s this change that will save polar bears or curb our oil-guzzling ways.

As much as I like Seattle — two of my kids live there, I went to college there and I love visiting the city — I see some irony in this week’s decision to slap a fee on disposable bag users.

This is a city with an official celebration centered around — what? Massive and conspicuous consumption of fossil fuel, that’s what.

Seafair’s big weekend is a few days away. The U.S. Navy Blue Angels jets that scream over Lake Washington can go almost twice the speed of sound, about 1,400 mph. Unlimited hydroplanes are powered by jet turbines these days. That fuel bill must be mind-boggling, to say nothing of the effects on birds and fish.

I’d never say Seattle should dump its hydro races. I’m only saying that if we ever get really serious about earth-friendly changes, it will take more — lots more — than a new way of bagging groceries.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.