Efforts to halt plastic waste shouldn’t end with Kroger
Michelle Land doesn’t have to watch footage of sea turtles die after ingesting plastic bags to know they’re horrid. She’s seen proof closer to home. “I’ve seen stray dogs at the side of the road eating them,” said Land, who started a group called Manicure Memphis to conduct cleanups in neighborhoods such as Orange Mound.
“The bags have all kinds of things caught in them, and they attract animals, and the animals die.”
The threat single-use plastic shopping bags pose to critters, and the complications they create for cleanups and recycling, is another reason why people like Land, as well as Jared Myers, executive director of The Heights Community Development Corporation, applauded when Kroger recently announced plans to phase them out.
Kroger, which owns more than 2,700 supermarkets throughout the nation, plans to stop using the bags by 2025 — a date which gives the store time to assist its customers in transitioning to alternatives such as reusable paper bags or cloth bags.
Apparently, heightened awareness about ocean and river pollution from the bags — the U.S. uses 380 billion of them each year — as well as customer concerns about the excessive waste they create prompted the change.
Plastic bags, in fact, cost Memphis $5.6 million a year to be buried in landfills. In March, that expense prompted the City Council to consider taxing people 7 cents per bag to force them to seek alternatives.
But that proposal went nowhere — perhaps because in a city as poor as Memphis and in a state where food is taxed, it’s kind of hard to ask people to pay more on a shopping trip.
Nonetheless, the bags remain a problem.
“It’s hard to recycle leaves as compost because of the plastic bags,” said Myers, who also said that many people in his neighborhood near National Street and Summer Avenue, walk to Kroger.
The bags, he said, often wind up buried in the leaf piles.
Said Land: “They’re a pain to pick up because most of the time, they get stuck in things, and all kinds of things get stuck in them.
“When we pick up stuff from parking lots and gutters, the plastic bags get stuck in all that, and they’re matted with grass and debris and other waste.”
Of course, Kroger isn’t the only entity whose plastic bags wind up on streets and in waterways. Several smaller grocers and convenience stores rely on them as well.
Which is why, even as Kroger sets the most visible example for ending plastic waste, the effort shouldn’t stop there — especially when smaller stores that use the bags tend to be concentrated in poorer areas.
Such areas especially need help in curbing plastic bag pollution, because the litter problems they fuel take a toll on residents’ self-esteem, said the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., whose church, New Olivet Baptist Church, operates a charter school, Arrow Academy of Excellence, in the struggling Buntyn area.
“In our neighborhood, they look like Christmas ornaments in the trees, and it’s almost impossible to clean them up because the wind blows them up in the trees,” Whalum said.
“But it ends up being more than just physical litter. It ends up being mental and geographical litter, and it becomes processed into how they (residents) see the world and themselves.” He’s not wrong. A 2012 Ohio State University study, for example, which examined the impact of litter on inner-city residents found that many of them saw trash and litter as a pervasive problem that not only fueled respiratory problems, infection fears and rodents, but depression as well.
On top of that, many said that litter contributed to stress in their environment. And when it comes to plastic bags, which get stuck in, and mixed with, all kinds of contaminants, concerns about infections aren’t farfetched.
Ultimately, Kroger’s move to eliminate plastic bags will make life easier for people to recycle and to clean up.
Streets and neighborhoods will be cleaner, as will oceans, rivers and lakes.
More sea turtles and stray dogs will live.
But if smaller stores follow suit, the end of plastic bags can lessen litter problems in areas that they serve.
That could have a side benefit of making the people who live there believe they have more value, and give them a sense of control over a problem they believed controlled them.
Which is what they need to build better lives.