Bag it.

'Paper or Plastic?' We're Asked at the Grocery Store, But What About Cloth?

For most of us, trotting off to the grocery store is an unloved chore done on automatic pilot. No wonder, then, that how we get those groceries home is the last thing on our minds. But the environmental impact of supermarket bags is daunting. And the best choice - cloth - is nowhere in sight.

The Pennsylvania Resources Council (PRC) estimates that less than five percent of U.S. shoppers use canvas or cotton mesh bags (also sometimes called string bags). Some 64 supermarket chains in the country offer cloth bags, but a 1991 study by the Grocery Industry Committee on Solid Waste found that cloth accounts for less than one percent of all bags used.

"'Bring your own bag' has been slow in taking off," says Ruth Becker, PRC's executive director. There was a big push for the cloth bags in the early '90s, she says, but that momentum "seems to have slowed down." Cloth bags are available, though: Co-op America lists a handful of companies that sell them in its National Green Pages.

Becker blames the bags' lack of popularity on their bulkiness. "What we need," she says, "is a canvas bag that can fold up and be stored in a pocketbook."

Paper Bagging

The flat-bottomed paper bag habit took off after Charles Stillwell of Philadelphia invented a machine to mass-produce them in 1883. Stillwell never got rich off his invention. He sold his patent (on the machine, not the bag) and moved to England where, amusingly, he spent the rest of his life trying to prove that Sir Francis Bacon really wrote William Shakespeare's plays.

Before Stillwell gave the world a disposable bag that could stand up on its own, people used paper bags made up by store employees and pasted together after a sale. These primitive paper bags had, in turn, displaced that old standby, the reusable canvas bag. Becker says that she has a still-usable canvas bag that her grandmother used for shopping.

The plastic grocery bag got off to a slow start on its path to dominance. According to the Plastic Bag Association (yes, there is one!), the modern-day plastic grocery bag, designed in Sweden and called the T-shirt bag, was introduced to U.S. markets in 1972 by Celloplast Corporation of Teterboro, New Jersey. Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, there were as many as 10 other plastic grocery bag designs available, including a flat-bottomed one that could stand on its own. But by 1984 the T-shirt bag was the only style in use.

Plastic bags didn't become cheaper than paper bags until the early 1980s, when Windmoeller and Holscher introduced a machine that produced 500 bags a minute, and Mobil Chemical challenged Celloplast's patent on the T-shirt bag - and won. In 1982, plastic bags had eight percent of the sack market. Today, 96 percent of U.S. groceries use plastic bags, and seven percent offer only plastic, according to the Food Marketing Institute.

But whichever bag you use - and FMI reports that customers prefer paper 2-to-1 - the best choice for the environment is a source of much debate.

Most paper grocery bags are made from virgin fibers (i.e., not recycled paper) to ensure their strength, according to John Javna, author of Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. And with one 15- to 20-year-old tree yielding 700 paper bags, that means more than 14 million trees are cut down for a year's supply of paper grocery bags. Advocates of paper, however, point out that at least trees are a renewable resource and that the bags are easily recycled.

Plastic bags come from the nonrenewable resource petroleum. And though used plastic bags can be recycled into new ones, Bob Householder of Sonoco Products, a manufacturer of plastic bags based in Hartsville, S.C., says it doesn't happen often. "Because of contaminants, it's more expensive to turn old bags into new bags than it is to make new ones," he says.

Still, Householder says, "there's now a market for used plastic bags." Some plastic furniture manufacturers, for example, are paying retail grocers for the bags they collect from customers. About half of the nation's supermarkets, groceries with sales of $2 million or more a year, provide bins to collect the 32 billion plastic bags carried out of stores each year, Householder says. Those stores that provide bins are seeing about 17 percent of their plastic bags returned, he says.

Plastic advocates also point to a recent West German study that found that making plastic bags requires less energy than making paper bags, and that "in all, [they do] less damage to the environment."

Paper Losing the Fight

Consumers may wake up to discover that their bag-buying decisions have been made for them, because paper is tiding.

According to the American Forest and Paper Association, 25 billion paper bags were used by grocery stores in 1984. By last year, that figure plummeted to 10 billion paper bags, even though the number of supermarkets had increased from 28,680 to 32,661. The decline can be attributed mostly to higher paper costs, but it means that 75 percent of all bags leaving a grocery store are plastic, Householder says.

If you can't kick the paper or plastic habit, and find recycling bags to be a hassle, the next best thing to do is to reuse them. About 40 supermarket chains offer a rebate of two to five cents for shoppers who return with last week's bags for this week's groceries. Possibly because the monetary incentive is so small, shoppers have been slow to warm up to the idea. The Hannaford Brothers chain of groceries reports that slightly more than one percent of its customers reuse their bags.

Controlling Grocery Waste

Besides deciding how to carry the groceries home, there are environmental decisions to make about what gets stuffed into those paper, plastic and cloth bags once the shopping trip is over. First, Becker recommends, go to the store with a list and stick to it. "Impulse buying accounts for a third of what we take home, two-thirds of which we just throw away," she says.

Next, pay attention to what you buy. Get products with the least amount of packaging (for example, rice in a box instead of in a boiler bag inside a box). Buy recyclable products that are packaged in recycled material and that carry the recycling symbol - three twisted arrows forming a rounded triangle.

The idea, Becker said, is to "close the recycling loop" and send a signal to manufacturers that there's a market for minimally packaged products. The Pennsylvania Resources Council provides a $2 pamphlet listing just such supermarket fare. Finally, buy items that can be reused instead of disposables (for example, rechargeable instead of regular batteries).

Although it will always be a chore, grocery shopping need not be a monument to wasteful consumerism.

CONTACT: American Forest and Paper Association, 1111 19th Street NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20036/[phone]; Pennsylvania Resources Council, 3606 Providence Road, Newtown Square, PA 19073/[phone].

RELATED ARTICLE: REUSE THAT GROCERY PACKAGING?

Good grocery surfing is all about creative reuse. Here are some examples:

* Plastic grocery bags can be used as small trash can liners, "suitcases" for the kids' sleepovers, and "gym bags" for hauling wet swimsuits home from the ocean or swimming pool.

* Plastic sandwich bags can be washed out and reused, as can plastic lunch bags. Paper bags can be reused;

* Cereal boxes can store a year's worth of magazines. They also make excellent boxes for gifts. Some communities also recycle them. If they do need to be thrown out, be certain to rip them up so that all the pieces lie flat, which reduces the amount of wasted space inside the trash bag, and the number of trash bags you use;

* Reuse large laundry detergent boxes as receptacles for dryer lint and used dryer sheets.

TRACY KOONTZ is a freelance writer in Cheltenham, PA.