What should we do with shopping bags?

Terri Pruitt

In 2018, the City of Kodiak joined hundreds of other communities in Alaska and the United States in passing ordinances banning the use of SINGLE USE PLASTIC RETAIL BAGS. This was done with a lot of enthusiasm for taking care of our island and our landfill.

The official purpose of the ban was to “reduce the generation of waste from disposable plastic shopping bags.” How did we get to the point of feeling like we needed a law banning single-use plastic shopping bags?

They were invented in 1967, and their use exploded in the ’70s. We have been in love with them ever since. They are cheap and easy to use. They are hygienic. They are minorly reusable as small trash liners, for scooping pet poop, for carrying your lunch once or twice, for putting wet bathing suits in your luggage or for packing boxes for shipping.

Fast forward to today, and it is estimated that 100 BILLION of these lightweight plastic bags are given out in the U.S. every year, and only 5-10% of them are recycled (and it may be that they really aren’t recyclable).

These flimsy offending plastic bags are seen in the trees, on the beaches and in our waters because they blow around so easily. They end up in the ocean harming our marine life. We wanted to put an end to that. We wanted to encourage people to USE THEIR OWN SHOPPING BAGS.

It seems that in the first few years of Kodiak’s ban we were on our way. People started to collect shopping bags, and they bought reusable bags when they forgot their own and generally started to implement the new habit. We saw a reduction in the wind-blown bags.

Then the COVID Pandemic hit. Personal shopping bags were not allowed for a while. Sanitation was chosen over sustainability. People got out of the habit of bringing their own bags.

Partially due to curb-side service container requirements, Walmart came out with a plastic retail shopping bag that is reusable and started giving the bags out as needed for no charge. There are lots of opinions on that bag, but the reality is that it is contributing to people NOT using their reusable bags.

As other communities around the country live with their bans, they are seeing some interesting results. One of them is noncompliance because of a lack of enforcement. It happened in Anchorage and New York, and it has happened here in Kodiak. There just isn’t enough funding to police these ordinances.

Some states have even gone so far as to repeal the bag bans as unconstitutional. Texas for example. It sees lobbying pressure from the petrochemical/plastics businesses in that state.

And then there’s the question of true sustainability in our paper or cotton bags. The paper industry is notoriously dirty, as is the cotton agricultural industry. Are those bags really better for the environment?

Think about what you would like to see for our community. So many challenges and questions have clouded the original intentions of implementing bans on single-use plastic retail bags, but we must believe that our efforts to live more sustainably are worth it. It will take a lot of trial and error. We should never give up.

I saw a person bring out their full shopping cart and unload it into several small boxes completely bypassing the need for bags. I imagine they brought the boxes into their house, unloaded them and brought them back out into the car. Great answer!

For now, I am going to do my best to continue to bring my own shopping bags. Cotton, paper and plastic.

Terri Pruitt has lived in Kodiak for 31 years. She is passionate about keeping Kodiak beautiful, and has been on the Solid Waste Advisory Board for more than two years.

Terri Pruitt has lived in Kodiak for 31 years. She is passionate about keeping Kodiak beautiful, and has been on the Solid Waste Advisory Board for more than two years.

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