Plastic Purge by Michael SanClements

Author:Michael SanClements
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

The Modern Grocery Store

Ever heard the saying “shop the edges”? Shop the edges means avoiding the middle of the grocery store, because it is mainly full of junk food, which as I pointed out above, is usually packaged in plastic. The edges are usually comprised of the produce, bakery, deli, and butcher sections of the grocery. These areas all tend to have products with a lot less packaging than the center of the store, and also contain foods that tend to be less processed. While I was doing my plastic purge experiment, it was this connection that resulted in Mary and me losing weight and feeling really healthy during our purge. And who isn’t psyched to shrink their footprint and their waistline?

So you’ve got the big picture, right? Stick to the edges of the store and beware the junk food in the middle. This is going to be our guiding principle as we navigate the modern grocery store and cut the crappy foods and plastic from our carts. I’m not saying that you can never eat junk food, but rather, I’m proposing that you might find that awareness of your plastic consumption can give you a new lens through which to think about your shopping cart.

Now it’s time for some specifics.

Reusable Grocery Bags : Let’s start really basic: Avoid the evils of plastic bags (see chapter 11). Go buy some reusable grocery bags. You can get them at most grocery stores or order them online. Actually, you can get them just about anywhere these days. We have around ten of them in our home, but four or five seems to do the trick for a week’s worth of groceries for two people. Personally, I recommend buying a thinner nylon bag with longer handles, especially if you plan on walking to the store from time to time. The longer handles make placing a full bag of groceries over your shoulder on the walk home from the store more comfortable.

Since we’re talking about bags, it might occur to you to ask the question: What about just using paper bags instead of plastic, because trees are a renewable resource and paper is biodegradable and can be recycled? Well, actually, the EPA found that the production of paper bags requires more energy and results in more pollution than the production of plastic bags.

I came across some articles positing that the plastic grocery bag was created to help ease the pressures of paper bag production on forest resources. Which it may have, but clearly there are a host of other problems that have arisen from them.

Surprisingly, the plastic bag wasn’t really used widely until the 1980s, and only came into existence in 1977. That means when I was born (1976), there was no paper versus plastic option at the grocery store. We’d be better off if things stayed that way and the plastic bag hadn’t been invented, because today it’s estimated that globally one hundred billion to one trillion plastic bags are used annually. That’s a lot of plastic!

And making plastic bags isn’t a cost-free endeavor by any stretch.

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