Taking the old bag shopping

That sounds like something my father would say, jokingly, if he were taking my mother shopping. They have that kind of relationship.

But I'm talking about plastic bags. The kind that whip in the breeze, get stuck in fences or hedges, and are used to pick up dog feces. (Unless it's late at night, and the house whose yard your dog is defecating in has all the lights turned off. In which case the plastic bag stays firmly in your pocket, and you run like hell back home after your dog has done his/her business.)

Earlier this year San Francisco's Board of Supervisors approved a city-wide ban on plastic bags, the first such city in the U.S. to do so. The country of Ireland did it even before San Francisco.

On April 2, Leaf Rapids, Manitoba became the first Canadian city to go plastic bag free. Leaf Rapids...isn't that the name of a famous viking?

Non-plastic bag resolutions are now likely to become as popular as Starter apparel circa 1988. So I think the logical next question is....how will these resolutions affect the price of tortillas in Mexico?

Whoa, that's a non sequitur, you might say. But it's not, and globalization is to blame. And maybe Thomas Friedman, who I just never really liked. Thanks to journalist Melanie Tromp for providing the information below. Read her article on this.

Here's the six degrees between non-plastic bag resolutions and rising tortilla prices in Mexico:

Step 1: A city passes a resolution eliminating non-recyclable plastic bags.

Step 2: Grocery stores start supplying "biodegradable" plastic bags in massive quantities. (To give you perspective on how many bags are put out into the world, more than one million plastic bags are discarded worldwide every minute.)

Step 3: "Biodegradable" plastic bags actually require more energy and resources to produce. Corn and soybean oil are often used as components.

Step 4: The demand for corn (in part to produce more "biodegradable" bags) skyrockets. As per supply and demand rules, the price of corn therefore skyrockets.

Step 5: In Mexico, tortillas are the chief starch staple for millions of Mexican people. Corn is essentially the primary ingredient in tortillas.

Step 6: The price of corn, and therefore tortillas, rises at a level of ten times the minimum wage in Mexico. People can't afford to make tortillas. People go hungry. People riot.

So that's how plastic bags and tortillas are connected. More ironic, and the reason I put "biodegradable" in quotation marks, is that "biodegradable" bags only decompose in certain soil conditions.

What's that? That's the sound of a very nice sounding city council resolution - like the kind of resolution that bans non-recyclable plastic bags - bumping up against the reality that, in the end, it's not all that helpful in addressing the myriad environmental problems caused by plastic, whether you throw the word "biodegradable" in front of it or not.

The real solution, as Tromp (and those she interviews) points out, is to couple these plastic bag resolutions with a call to address consumption, and specifically to look at REDUCING the amount of bags we use.

"By taking the old bag shopping just 11 times, the consumer delivers a lower environmental impact than one single-use plastic bag." -- Tracey Saxby, co-founder of Greener Footprints in British Columbia

So here's to taking the old bag shopping, as opposed to picking up new "biodegradable" bags each time we visit the store. Now I just need to figure out a way to scoop up my dog's business sans plastic.