The plastic bag is squarely in the gun sights of the NYC shoperati it seems: 800 canvas “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” bags sold out in 3 hours in Soho yesterday.

One day there will only be a fossilized record of plastic bags remaining, three feet in depth, set firmly between the old tire layer and the diaper layer.

In the meantime, here is a really interesting link about how plastic can be made out of plants instead of fossil fuels. I figured as much.

For a couple of years I’ve been saying that whenever I go to the corner store in my neighborhood. Last night I was standing in line and heard the woman in front of me say it. I glanced up and saw that she had five or six good-sized items on the counter. I was impressed.

Maybe my neighborhood is going bagless from the bottom up.

Another hack from the NY Times, which suddenly seems to be edging its way into worldhacking territory:

A Plastic Wrapper Today Could Be Fuel Tomorrow.

From the article:

Scientists worldwide are struggling to make motor fuel from waste, but Richard Gross has taken an unusual approach: making a “fuel-latent plastic,” designed for conversion. It can be used like ordinary plastic, for packaging or other purposes, but when it is waste, can easily be turned into a substitute diesel fuel.

Not bad! Similar conceptually to Abe’s comment on Bags is a Hard One, and also to The Edible Bag, namely that we should be designing plastic bags to be disposed of in a way that delivers energy back into the system after use.

The bag of the future, the thing that will replace the 500 billion plastic bags made and thrown away each year, is not a self-cleaning bag, not an edible bag (unfortunately), it is this: the super bag.

The super bag, like the one Lia describes below, is a fold-up reusable bag. But the super bag is not some bulky thing to fit in your purse — it’s something to fit in your pocket. It’s a bag that is so collapsible, and made of material so fine, that when not being used as a bag it’s the size of a condom. You keep several of them in your pocket at all times wherever you go. They’re just part of the stuff you carry with you whenever you go out - your car keys, your spare change, your cell phone. Need a bag, reach in and pop one out. Done, collapse it and it goes back in your pocket. Find yourself at the store without one? You just buy another for several bucks and add it to your stock, the way you do with umbrellas.

Is such a bag possible to build? Seems totally doable, with a little help from NASA and RONCO.

I was thinking just now about recycling bags versus reusing them. Each option has serious drawbacks.

While I like Abe’s reply below, about recycling bags but using them as a sort of fertilizer-spreading mechanism, I think in general the process of creating a bag to be used only once before recycling is pretty faulty system, and one with hugely unnecessary energy requirements.

The idea of reusing bags seems to skirt around this energy waste problem, but it has equal problems of its own, namely that any bag that makes its way into public use and then gets reused must first be totally sterilized in order to be trustworthy for reuse by someone else. This too carries a huge, undesireable energy requirement. Reusing bags and sterilizing them each time could possibly require more energy to maintain than just recycling them. And it could probably create as much toxic byproduct, to boot.

So in this light, I’m starting to think that the idea of bringing your own bag to the grocery store each time you go is not such a bad idea after all. It kills both of the above birds with one stone. The bags are multiple-use, and there is no need for a sterilization system - the burden falls on the bag owner to keep it clean (and he will).

Bringing your own personal bags to the grocery store is actually a terrific system for transporting groceries while getting rid of disposable bags. It’s cheap, efficient, and requires no new infrastructure to work.

The problem is the bags. Big, bulky canvas bags that you have to carry with you to the store, and that you have to have the foresight to bring with you before you leave for the store, seem hopelessly idealistic to me. There’s too much work involved, too much thinking involved, the system is too rigid, for it to ever be embraced on a large scale.

But what we need maybe is to rethink idea of the canvas bag…

Oh my god, I was just reading over that last post, when I came up with the perfect solution: edible shopping bags! Each bag is made out of food and tastes GREAT. You get home from shopping and you CANT WAIT TO EAT THE BAG. It tastes so damn good. And it’s nutritional, too. 100% of your daily vitamin C. Feed it to the kids.

That’s the solution. No more plastic bags, no pesky biodegradable bags, no reuse, no recycling. And I didn’t even need five cups of coffee to get there.

This issue of bags is a tough one. I’m looking back over that last post on the self-cleaning bag, and thinking it isn’t that hot a solution. I mean, you’ve still got a disposable bag inside that non-disposable bag, so where’s the gain? In all fairness, I was hopped up on about five cups of coffee when I wrote that, and when you have that much coffee everything seems like a good idea. The inner critic gets squelched by caffeine.

So self-cleaning bags is not necessarily a winner. But I don’t agree with the comment on esprsso that organic throwaway bags are ultimately the best fix. Why throw something away after you’ve used it once? With throwaway bags, each bag has to be manufactured then transported to site of use, then after being used it has to be transported to the dump, where it has to decompose for x years before being of any use to anybody or anything. That’s a lot of work to go through for a single food-carrying event. A lot of entirely unnecessary work, were it not for the whole cleanliness issue and the whole convenience issue.

Convenience + cleanliness = throwaway stuff. Is there a way to change that equation?

Five more cups of coffee may provide some insight. But it’s not going to come this week — out of time. And right now, I’m going to go get me a burger in a styrofoam box, take it away in a bag, eat it, and throw away all of the throwaway stuff that came with it.

The solution to the problem with bag swapping, namely gunky bags, is of course the invention and production of Self-Cleaning Bags.

Self-cleaning bags would be ultra-durable plastic bags with ultra-thin, nondurable, decomposable liners.

Bring the bag back to the store after you use it, pull out the inner liner and recycle it, put a new one in, and you’ve got a new, clean bag for use by someone else.

Very simple.

The problem with bags is not the what they’re made out of - it’s that they’re used once then thrown away. A city that uses only plastic bags for groceries is perfectly sustainable, so long as each individual bag is a (semi-) permanent fixture in the city infrastructure, getting used and reused indefinitely. If bags are not disposable, it doesn’t matter much what they’re made of.

At the same time, the current bag system used worldwide, in which an unlimited supply of bags awaits you at the grocery store each time you shop, works really well from the perspective of convenience. In contrast, a system where everyone brings their own bags from home (i.e. privately-owned canvass bags) is inconvenient and difficult for shoppers. You always either end up with too many bags for your groceries, or not enough bags. I’m not opposed to it per se, but I think it’s probably an unnecessary step backwards.

The solution then is not to make bags out of one substance or another, or make them recycleable or small or whatever. It’s to make them strong, and then reuse them forever.

We’re going to call this ‘bag swapping’: you pick up as many bags as you need at the grocery store, pack your groceries into them, take them home, store them, then the next time you go back to the store, take them back and put them back into the pool. You go get your groceries, and take more bags out of the pool. And someone else gets the bags you put back.

Each bag is highly durable, can be used hundreds or thousands of times. Maybe it’s made out of plastic, maybe it’s made out of canvass. Who cares? Either way, the system requires a relatively small, static number of bags to be manufactured, so it’s not a major problem no matter what it’s made out of.

You still get the convenience of having exactly as many bags as you need at the store, and not having to carry your own personal bags with you everywhere you go.

It’s a city-wide network of bags coming and going every which way.

Sounds pretty cool, yes. The one sticky point with this idea is of course cleanliness. Who wants a bag that has been used by someone else?

Council members in my hometown of San Francisco made world news last week by voting to ban plastic bags in grocery stores.

I love that San Francisco is willing to experiment and take the lead on issues that other cities would only address after a federal mandate had been issued. They get a lot of points for pushing issues forward in world debate.

However as USA Today pointed out, one part of the solution proposed by SF to plastic bags, namely paper bags, is equally problematic, requiring 4 times as much energy to produce, and and 85 times as much energy to recycle.

So the question I get asked every day is now asked on the national, political stage: paper or plastic?