I am strangely remembering an old episode of the A-team as I start this post.
I actually think that it was the first episode when Murdock, the insane helicopter pilot, is being sprung out of the psych ward to join the rest of the team for a mission.
Murdock walks through the hospital saying; “Bags! Bags We got Bags!”
Well, during my first experiences with German grocery stores…they didn’t have bags!
I couldn’t figure it out as I hand carried all of my groceries out the door. I later found out that they do have bags, but in Germany you have to buy them. So the next time, I discovered the cloth bag for reusing.
Several months later, the on-post commissary (grocery store) began advertising their own cloth bags.
The bags are stronger that paper or plastic and easier to carry. I think they cost a dollar or so which isn’t much. I think Monica has about ten or twenty of them. She will get them out before she goes to the store and take them back in full of groceries–these hold up to thirty pounds. I’ve been here so I haven’t seen the complete operation, but it works for her!
The point is. A million bags are used every minute. We can reduce this by simply reusing the ones that we do buy.  don’t have problem with bags. We need bags. But, we can take simple routine steps to reduce the amount of bags that we use for one trip to the store and go into the trash 15 or 20 minutes after we use it.
Stephanie says
I got the heads-up about the bag issue in France before my first shopping trip. I have a large collection of bags in our container on the ocean. I cannot wait for them to get here so I can start using them again. The good news is that I have seen cloth bags in the grocery stores here in the past 2 days, and have seen people buying them. The real difference will come when people in the US have to buy the plastic bags instead of getting them for free. People seem to have to feel it in the wallet before they make a change.