On June 1, according to news reports, the Sointula Co-operative Store became the first retailer in British Columbia to eliminate plastic bags.
The co-op, which serves a village of the same name on Malcolm Island, between the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland, now sells paper bags at 10 cents apiece, or reuseable cloth ones for $1.50 each.
What happened in tiny Sointula is happening in a lot of other places. In late May, the mighty Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which once handed out about 80 million plastic bags a year, announced that its stores will stop using them when the current supply runs out - likely by the end of the summer.
Ontario took its cue from the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission, which has announced it is getting out of plastic bags by the fall. Government-owned liquor stores in Quebec and Manitoba are reportedly doing the same.
The Canadian Plastics Industry Association is in a mighty huff over all this and understandably so. Its member companies employ 11,000 people directly and 30,000 indirectly in the province of Ontario alone.
The switch from plastic to paper containers threatens jobs and investment.
The CPIA has responded, its website says, by setting up a bag task group and hiring a public relations firm - PR Post - to develop "key messaging around plastic bags" and "to help you (the members) set the record straight when dealing with the subject of plastic bags."
The messaging - spin, the skeptics call it - is all environmental. The association says that producing a paper bag consumes 2.2 times more non-renewable energy, 4.7 times more water and emits 3.1 times as much greenhouse gases.
Paper bags are also bulkier and heavier which means more trucks on the road. CPIA says it takes seven of them to haul two million paper bags versus one to move the same number of plastic bags - not good for our congested highways and smog-filled skies.
The plastics association could also point out that switching to paper bags won't be good for Canada's forests either.
But all this probably wouldn't make a difference. These days, CPIA is whistling against a very strong wind on this issue. Public opinion appears to be shifting and the single-use plastic bag is in danger of being swept away by a whirlwind of environmental righteousness.
Currently, there is a digital slideshow circulating on the internet - The Dangers of Plastic Bags!! - which arrives as an e-mail attachment.
These slides are attributed to reputable sources - the Environmental Protection Agency, the World Wildlife Fund and the Christian Science Monitor, to name a few - and they make the case against throwaway plastic bags succinctly and forcefully.
They contend that: 500 billion to one trillion are consumed each year and that less than one per cent are recycled; that it costs $4,000 to recycle a ton of plastic bags, but they will only fetch $32 per ton; that they account for more than 10 per cent of the debris that washes up on U.S. coastlines; and that 200 different species of sea life, including whales, dolphins, seals and turtles, die by inadvertently eating plastic bags or being ensnared in them.
The slides also assert that Bangladesh and Rwanda have banned them; that China prohibits distribution of free plastic bags; that Ireland has reduced consumption by 90 per cent through imposing a tax; and that San Francisco in 2007 became the first U.S. city to ban them.
Plastic bags are ubiquitous. They are accepted and used worldwide because they are strong, versatile and resilient - enormously so - and come to us, like most other forms of plastic packaging, at no apparent cost.
Retailers don't charge us directly, therefore we place no value on them. We use them for a few minutes or less and throw them away. We have been careless, cavalier and unconscionably wasteful until now.
The question for the industry is whether consumers begin to think about the environmental pricetag associated with dozens of other single-use plastic products such as milk bags, bottled water containers, egg crates and meat trays, to name a few.
That could well happen since the price of the raw materials, namely oil and natural gas, is exploding.
If it does, the grocery industry will be forced to rethink its entire approach to packaging and marketing. (D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)
