Big Plastic Says: Reusable Shopping Bags Will Make You Sick!

Los Angeles County wants residents to remember to bring their reusable grocery bags. To that end, the County recently approved a ban on single-use plastic bags at grocery stores that will affect more than one million Angelenos, making it the largest ban in the state thus far. The benefits of weaning ourselves off plastic bags are endless, and they're especially necessary because recycling efforts in L.A. County have failed for years.

Prior to the ban, the opposition fought back fiercely. The American Chemistry Council (ACC), for example, bankrolled a campaign warning that the legislation would cause job loss and increase costs for low-income consumers. But amid the usual Big Plastic rolodex of ridiculous and misleading excuses (opposers even has the audacity to say that banning plastic bags is actually bad for the environment), a new one emerged: Reusable bags habor germs that make people sick.

Earlier this year, the ACC — which represents such upstanding citizens as Exxon and Chevron — paid for a study that concluded that unwashed reusable bags can be contaminated with bacteria. Let's remember that these are the same folks who recently lobbied to keep the hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) in baby bottles. Big Plastic is using fear-mongering tactics to get health-conscious environmentalists to switch back to disposable, single-use plastic grocery bags.

But let's use our heads for a second: You wouldn't leave a leaky container of raw chicken in your reusable tote for the car ride home and expect to eat off it afterwards. As environmentalist Mark Gold points out in his blog, the obvious solution is to simply wash your reusable shopping bags with soapy water. Other options include purchasing one of the many machine-washable totes that are available. I wash mine every week, and they've been going strong for years. Furthermore, the bag ban doesn't extend to plastic bags used for loose produce or meat, so you can still bag up the chicken and keep it separate from the rest of your groceries if you're especially concerned.

As you may have read on Change.org, a different health concern with reusable bags emerged recently. Lead was found in reusable shopping bags sold at two national grocery store chains. According to Gold, L.A. County side-stepped this issue by demanding that all reusable bags sold in stores affected by the ban would need to keep levels of lead, cadmium, or any other heavy metal below toxic amounts.

The L.A. County ban was a response to failed statewide plastic bag legislation proposed earlier this year. Now it's up to each city and/or county in California to enact their own bans. According to the Los Angeles Times, the ban affects only unincorporated areas of L.A. County and will cover 1,000 stores. The ban also imposes a fee on paper bags at the store, further encouraging shoppers to bring their own bags and burying the ACC's excuse that banning plastic simply drives shoppers to paper, also a bad environmental choice.

According to Gold, this individual ban should result in a 600 million-bag reduction annually in L.A. County. Just think of what we could accomplish if we got more of California on the plastic bag ban bandwagon. Sign our petition urging the City of Los Angeles to follow the County's lead and become the next region to ban plastic bags.

Photo credit: EvelynGiggles via Flickr