Grocer gives plastic bags the sack

Whole Foods to limit bagging options for the environment

Tom Sharpe | The New Mexican

1/22/2008 - 1/23/08

Would you like paper or ... paper?

Soon that will be your only choice at Whole Foods Market unless you bring your own plastic bags. The Austin, Texas-based natural-foods grocery chain announced this week that it will discontinue the use of plastic bags by April 22.

"By Earth Day, we'll be plastic-free," said Tim Lenihan, manager of the local store at 753 Cerrillos Road.

This is the most recent effort by the grocery to conform to environmental or humane practices.

In 2006, Whole Foods quit keeping live lobsters in tanks at all its stores. It quit carrying Chilean sea bass for five years because it was becoming depleted by overfishing. The store resumed carrying the fish about a year ago after its stocks rebounded.

Plastic bags clog landfills and sewers, pollute rivers and lakes, and often end up snagged on trees, bushes and cacti. The Worldwide Institute estimates it takes 430,000 gallons of crude oil to produce 100 million plastic bags, which take more than 1,000 years to break down. Of the 100 billion plastic bags used each year in the United States, less than 1 percent are recycled.

Lenihan estimated that slightly more customers choose paper than plastic at Whole Foods, with about 15 percent bringing their own reusable bags. Customers who bring their own bags get 10-cent discounts for each bag — plastic or paper — saved.

Outside Whole Foods on Tuesday, most customers said they were pleased with the change.

Linda Fazio, who left the store with four plastic bags, said she tried to "reuse all the bags so I feel better about it," but she noticed her checker had put her chicken in a separate bag. "That's kind of unnecessary," she said. "But I guess I should be more conscientious myself."

Jay Bishop, who left with a single paper bag, said the change makes no difference to him. "I really have no special preference," he said.

Michael Szczepanski, who carried his own fabric bag, said he's been doing this for several years. "It's one of those things that I never thought about, and then one day, I realized how many bags I used, and it seemed pretty wasteful."

Conventional groceries around Santa Fe offer recycling bins for plastic bags, but don't keep track of the paper/plastic breakdown. But nationally, groceries report 90 percent of their customers ask for plastic. According to The Associated Press, plastic bags cost about 2 cents each, compared to 5 cents each for paper.

At La Montañita Co-op, 913 W. Alameda St., manager Will Prokopiak estimated the plastic/paper split is equal, with 10 to 15 percent of customers bringing their own bags and getting a 5 cent discount on each bag saved. "What we've actually seen over the last probably three or four months is a steady growth and increase of that," he said.

San Francisco recently banned most plastic bags, and Santa Fe City Councilor Chris Calvert has recently been looking into discouraging their use by charging for them. "I don't think you can necessarily outright ban them," he said. "Maybe (a customer) is from out of town, and they need them, but they would have to pay for them."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.