hooray for Whole Foods!

Whole Foods grocery chain just announced that it is bagging the use of plastic bags in its stores. At the risk of sounding like a tree-hugger, I would like to applaud that decision! Americans use about 100 million bags each year, and as you know from experience, their life span is usually pretty short. Sure, sometimes we reuse them to line the bathroom trashcan or to throw a poopy diaper in. But most of the time, you get home from the store 10 minutes after your purchase and toss them in the trash. These bags litter the roads, city streets, rivers, and they're filling up the landfills and just hanging around for thousands of years.

Sarah and I bought canvas shopping bags at Trader Joe's a year ago in LA. It took us awhile to get in the habit of actually bringing the bags into the store, but now it is routine. We always used paper in the past, but even paper is not the best because it requires virgin timber to produce. At any rate, I figure that we've saved well over 400 paper bags in the past year alone using our canvas bags. Even if you dismiss my hippiness, you have to agree that if grocery stores didn't have to supply bags for their shoppers, it might eventually save us some money because they could cut their costs.