When it comes to reusable bags, men lag

I came out of the liquor store last week clutching four wine bottles in my hands, with another gripped under my chin. I’d stopped impulsively while walking home and didn’t have a reusable bag with me, let alone one of those SAQ divided ones that are useless everywhere else. I wasn’t paying another 90 cents to enlarge my collection of four in the car, six in the liquor cabinet and more by the front door. So I precariously carried the bottles home like I was competing in the Olympic triple Lutz, no-slip, no-fall, no-smash Montreal Icy Sidewalk competition. I’m getting way too good at it. I’m a last-minute, spontaneous shopper who often decides to buy things when I’m walking by my local bakery, butcher or pharmacy. Then I embarrassedly realize I don’t have a bag, again. So I often stick a tomato in my breast pocket, or asparagus spears in my pants, and occasionally find a mouldy cheese in my jacket pocket weeks after buying it. Montreal banned single-use plastic bags more than a year ago, but like many people, especially men, I’m still not fully re-educated. “Men are worse, absolutely, at least twice as bad as women or more,” says Fernanda, my local fish shop owner at Poissonnerie S. Miguel, echoing several other store owners. “I try to educate them, but some older men don’t understand and get mad at the 15-cent bag charge. With younger men, maybe 60 per cent don’t bring a bag, but most don’t ask for plastic ones, they just carry things by hand.” Adds Kristina at Eatz Encore in Westmount: “Men are always telling me they have bags in the car, but they forgot to bring them in. Women definitely bring more bags.” In recent weeks, I’ve talked to an informal focus group of 20 guys, aged 25 to 70, and most admit they’re lagging at bagging. Many guys bring reusable sacks when shopping by car, but they often forget to put their empty ones back in the trunk and don’t have any next time. Unlike women I spoke to, almost no guys have a bag along when they stop to shop spontaneously, on foot. Why isn’t bagging our bag? Are women more organized multitaskers? Are they more committed to cleaning up our oceans and planet, as some studies have found, reported under media headlines like: “Men Resist Green Behaviour As Unmanly.” Actually, I think the answer is simpler. Some women carry purses, so many have little rolled-up bags in them for an emergency stop-and-shop. But most guys just have a wallet, which isn’t much good for shlepping groceries. although we often forget that till we’re at the cash. Still, there’s hope for us yet. Our bag re-education program is just part of the curriculum of our changing ecological age. I’ve long since become an anti-littering zealot who hasn’t tossed a sliver of garbage on the ground in over a decade. On a recent visit to Bangkok, I carried an unfinished pad thai for 30 minutes looking for a non-existent garbage can, before stuffing it into a pocket. Similarly, most of us have learned to separate out our garbage and have become junior composters, too, though not with the zeal of some towns in Japan, where residents must sort their trash into 34 different categories. I confess I don’t always scrub out every milk container, or peanut butter jar with Mr. Clean. But I wonder how much that matters when everyone’s waste goes to the same recycling plants — assuming our city’s plants actually recycle our garbage, not bury it in landfills. Whatever the truth, just as we’ve learned these other ecological skills, we will eventually be re-educated in plastic bag compliance, too. In fact, I’ve been trying harder to re-train myself recently, now that stores are giving out thicker bags that cost 15 cents each, use way more plastic and could probably be reused 500 times. I’ve started scrunching a couple of them into my coat pockets. But given all the other junk I hoard in there, it can create a scene at stores, when I empty my pockets of gloves, hats, keys, phones, pens, loose change, old parking stubs and chocolate bar wrappers, while customers behind me glare. Sometimes it’s easier just to murmur “Er, yes, I’ll have a bag with that, please.” Scientists keep telling us the human brain is plastic and can change at any age. But I’m still waiting for mine to become plastic about plastic. So how else can we hurry up guys without charging $15 a bag, instead of 15 cents? Maybe someone could invent a shopping pouch for men that explodes out of our wallets like an airbag? Or extra wide pants with 17 pockets we can cram a whole supermarket order into giving new meaning to “bag-gy” pants. We male laggards will eventually get better, I promise. But for 100-per-cent compliance, governments may need to take a more draconian step by making it mandatory for all men to carry purses.