For shame! (Or not.)

Boston recently went to a BYOB – bring your own bag – system. I’ve been mostly BYOB-ing for a few years, so it hasn’t been a big deal. Occasionally, I’m caught bag-less, out for a walk and forgot to stuff a roll-up bag in my pocket when I realize I really could use a couple of items from the store I’m passing. So I end up buying a bag.

Which I don’t really mind, if it’s a paper bag from Roche Brothers, as these do come in handy on occasion. But I do mind if it’s one of the new CVS bags, which aren’t quite as useful as the old plastic CVS bags. The old ones were good for scooping up loose garbage from bags that had been gnawed through by rats or raccoons, or for picking up the occasional dog-crap-on-the-sidewalk that some scofflaw leaves behind. The new CVS bags may be recyclable – I’m guessing they are – but they’re stiff and unwieldy and less good for picking up the odd dog crap.

Mostly, however, I bring my own: a backpack if I’m buying heavy-ish groceries, or one of the many rollups I try to remember to keep my pockets and pocketbooks stocked with.

There are plenty of good reasons for moving away from plastic bags. Plastics are creating those giant garbage patches in our oceans, and some of what makes up those patches are plastic bags. Those plastic bags are clogging our drains, polluting our rivers and riverbanks, waving from the branches of our trees.

Of course, there are a lot of other wasteful use of plastics out there.

Sure, I throw them into the recycle bin, but those flip-top plastic boxes my blueberries come in? Didn’t those blueberries used to come in green cardboard-y boxes that screamed biodegradable?

If I buy nuts at Fastachi’s they come in a paper bag; when I get them at the grocery store, they’re in a plastic container.

I like watermelon, and I should be embarrassed to admit that I buy chopped up chunks. In a plastic box.

Then there’s all the plastic that encases everything from toothbrushes to electronics.

Etc.

Plastic waste has become so prevalent that tales of dead whales found with pounds of plastic trash — including shopping bags — in their stomachs have become commonplace. In April, a pregnant whale washed ashore in Italy with more than 48 pounds of plastic inside the animal.

Humans, too, are ingesting plastic, but on a microscopic level, according to a study released this week from Australia’s University of Newcastle and commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund. Every week, people could be consuming approximately the weight of a credit card — 5 grams, or about 2,000 tiny pieces of plastic — mainly through water containing microplastics, the research found. (Source: NY Times)

Sigh…

When – 50 years ago now - the fellow in The Graduate gave Benjamin professional advice by telling him “One word: plastics,” he wasn’t kidding.

Anyway, encouraging people to use less plastic is a good thing, so I’m all for making the modest effort to bring my own bag. And maybe I’ll start buying a small watermelon and slicing it up myself.

Canada’s getting into BYOB, too. Our Neighbors to the North are looking to get rid of single-use plastics – those inglorious CVS bags! – within the next couple of years.

One Vancouver grocery store is getting into the act early. They’re encouraging customers to BYOB by charging them a nickel (Canadian, so not a real nickel) for a plastic bag printed with a supposedly embarrassing message:

Dr. Toews’ Wart Ointment Wholesale

Into the Weird Adult Video Emporium

The Colon Care Co-Op

The fine print on the bags read: “Avoid the shame. Bring a reusable bag.”

As so often happens with the best laid plans of mice and marketing folks, this one has somewhat backfired.

“Some of the customers want to collect them because they love the idea of it,” David Lee Kwen, the owner of the store, Vancouver’s East West Market, told The Guardian newspaper.

And they’re expressing their love of the idea on social media:

“I would 100 percent not use reusable bags, just to see which awesome bag I get next,” one commenter wrote on Facebook.

“Now that the entire region knows they are purposefully embarrassing, I’m even more inclined to get one. I might even buy extra bags to give to people,” a Twitter user said.

Methinks those “embarrassing” messages were a bit too funky, a bit too unreal, to actually embarrass anyone. Maybe if they’d featured adverts for products that someone might actually find embarrassing to purchase  – Preparation H, Beano, Depends – the campaign might have been more effective. Or maybe something that stated outright: This is a douchebag for someone who doesn’t care about the environment.

Points for trying, I guess.

Of course, they – and everyone else – will need to do more than just discourage (or not) people from using bad bags:

Even the Vancouver store that was trying to shame its customers into shunning plastic bags uses copious amounts of plastic packaging. Recent photographs of the store’s wares on Facebook show figs, mangoes, minicucumbers and sweet red peppers all for sale while wrapped in plastic.

Wrapping a minicucumber in plastic? One step forward, two steps back.

Come on, we can do better than this.