Your comments are great! Thank you for that great analysis! You do bring up a good point regarding the amount of labor/capital it takes to transport plastic vs paper bags.

Just curious, what company do you feel is doing the best they can to be green AND eliminate total waste?

-Chris

But then, you’d not really be surprised by most of this if you were from the ultimate green (emerald) city, Seattle. I’m still gathering the facts to write about the phenomenon this city is in so many ways. There, green is second nature to just living. Every other city I’ve lived in since, ‘doing’ green has been the walk of an alien. I wish I’d photojournalled years of taking plastic bags to the grocery store only to have the cashiers try to throw them away.

But even the ‘best’ get it wrong. The Saturday before Earth Day, I was at Whole Foods and over the loudspeaker they were proudly proclaiming that they would no longer be carrying plastic sacks because it takes xx number of years to biodegrade. 1) In the tight confines of a landfill not a whole lot of anything biodegrades (which is why I have a nuclear reactor in my backyard — a compost bin). 2) To transport equal numbers of bags to a destination, 1 semi-truck of plastic bags is equal to 9 semi-trucks of paper bags.

It’s about TOTAL waste. The only voice for this sort of logic was a long defunct magazine with the title “Garbage”. It was way before its time. They were brave enough to talk through the entire stream of issues like this (frequently getting bashed by the non-thinking who screamed ‘corporate sell-out’). The articles in that magazine should all be resurrected and sold over again. They were priceless.