Plastic Bags Better Protection Against Coronavirus

Paper or plastic?  Re-usable versus either paper or plastic?  Dan Wegman’s dad founded a large eastern grocery chain.  When the arguments about which bag was best first got rolling 30 years ago, Mr. Wegman told me a paper bag will last in a landfill for 14-hundred years.  The environmentalists say plastic will last forever in a sealed landfill.  Wegman’s point was paper was also going to be with us well beyond a few generations.

Plastic keeps the prices of our groceries lower.  Wegman’s used to give a friend of mine a 3 cent discount on each bag of groceries when he brought his own bags.  He wasn’t an environmentalist.  He was a Baptist preacher raised frugally in West Virginia.

The left tells us plastic bags foul the oceans but the overwhelming amount of plastic floating in the seas comes from Asia (mostly China).  The threat isn’t a local shopper at Fred Meyer and, yet.  In liberal bastions across the country, governments are banning plastic bags.  Or were banning the use.  Some of the moves are postponed.

It turns out plastic bags are far more sanitary than the re-usable.  Unless you were to launder the totes every day and even then plastic is likely a cleaner choice.

I’m not opposed to re-usable bags.  I use them for carrying things back and forth to the office.  My lunch.  Boxes of markers.  Cat food.  At home, I sometimes use them to organize closet storage.

I also don’t throw away every plastic bag.  Some get used for freezer storage.  Some for packing breakables.

You can read more about the health benefits of plastic by clicking this link.