{"id":4055,"date":"2010-04-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1970-01-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesliedinaberg.com\/wordpress\/?p=4055"},"modified":"2014-02-18T21:15:19","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T05:15:19","slug":"bag-lady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesliedinaberg.com\/wordpress\/?p=4055","title":{"rendered":"Bag Lady"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It’s taken me a while to get to this point. I’ve struggled and the results haven’t always been pretty, but I can now admit, loudly and proudly, that I’m a bag lady. The weight of my big fat carbon footprint<\/a> has been keeping me up at night for years-not to mention all those agonizing times I’ve had to resolve the eternal debate between paper and plastic-but this year on Earth Day<\/a> I’ll have a little more spring in my step because I’m finally, consistently doing one environmentally-friendly thing right.<\/p>\n

I’m a bag lady.<\/p>\n

I’ve got a lightweight, foldable, little chartreuse green number tucked away in my purse, ready to pull out at the pharmacy or the video store or library. And my car’s trunk is loaded with a vast assortment of canvas bags to be used for grocery shopping, picnics and all of the random sports equipment that seems to attach itself to my son.<\/p>\n

Inside the house we’ve got tradeshow swag bags advertising products no one’s ever heard of, reusable bags with dividers to hold wine, insulated bags to keep beer and sodas cold, and a scary number of canvas bags with the names of my employers who have long since gone out of business.<\/p>\n

Note to the Daily Sound<\/em>: do not give me a bag with your name on it.<\/p>\n

It took a while for me to make the bag lady transition. I started accumulating reusable grocery bags a few years ago, keeping them in my trunk so that they’d be ready whenever I went shopping. I can’t tell you how many times I left Ben and Jerry melting in the cart while I ran outside to get my canvas bags. Despite the fact that we should all be equally invested in preserving the environment, I’m sorry to say the people behind me in line didn’t really take a global view of that particular situation.<\/p>\n

Rather than further alienating Mother Earth by risking an altercation, I decided to start purchasing a canvas bag every time I forgot to bring my own into the grocery store. Kind of like my own personal, environmental tax. This is what finally made me make the change for good-it had to hit me in the wallet before I got in the habit of actually taking the bags out of the car before I walked in the store-my own personal tax.<\/p>\n

Now I understand that some people think “tax” is a dirty word, so if you’re one of those people you can substitute “benevolent donation to the environment” for “tax.” Our local city council recently bagged on an effort to put a bag tax on the ballot, after some members of the public were fit to be tied over the $23,000 they were planning to spend to survey the issue (though I hear they’re going to “study it” again this summer). Personally I think the council would have had more success with a “benevolent donation to the environment” campaign than a bag tax, but I’ve got an even simpler suggestion: stores should just stop stocking disposable bags. Use up what you’ve got and don’t order more.<\/p>\n

This seems to work just fine in France, where they’ve got some of the chicest bag ladies around.<\/p>\n

Don’t have a bag? Sorry, you’ll have to purchase one. That’ll cost you a dollar. Eventually your purse and your trunk and your garage will be so full of bags that you’ll have to start bringing them with you when you shop. Talk about an easy way to change people’s habits. San Francisco sacked plastic bags a few years ago after a study found that each bag represents a 17-cent local expense for cleanup, disposal, and lost recycling revenue. This January, Washington, D.C. (where “tax” apparently isn’t a dirty word) started charging a nickel for each disposable paper and plastic bag and their use went down 86 percent in a month. Imagine what a buck a bag would do?<\/p>\n

We’d have some pretty chic bag ladies running around Santa Barbara in no time flat.<\/p>\n

When Leslie’s not carting her canvas bags around town, she can be reached at Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. For more columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com<\/a>.\u00a0Originally published in the\u00a0Santa Barbara Daily Sound\u00a0<\/a>on April 9, 2010.<\/h6>\n

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