By Julie Hutchinson, Special to the Rocky
Friday, April 18, 2008
Paper or plastic?
It's a familiar refrain, and it may soon be part of your past.
Around the world, consumers are responding to the call from environmentalists to reduce or ban the use of plastic shopping bags. Efforts range from simple campaigns to boost recycling awareness to serious lobbying for - and against - laws forcing retailers to join the no-plastic parade.
Here at home, from grocery mega-chains to your neighborhood mom-and-pop, the hue is green and the cry is reuse, recycle, rethink.
Leading the call for a greener future is the Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods Market, which threw down a green gauntlet with its January announcement that no plastic bags would be used at checkout in any of its 270 stores in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, 18 of them in Colorado.
For Whole Foods customers who don't bring their own bags, the familiar brown grocery bag they take home will be made entirely of recycled paper products effective Tuesday, which is Earth Day.
Lakewood-based Vitamin Cottage, which now goes by the name Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage, has followed the lead of Whole Foods in its 26 stores, including 24 in Colorado. At the chain's newest Denver store at East Evans Avenue and South Colorado Boulevard, no plastic bags are used at checkout. In remaining stores, checkout plastic bags will not be replaced once they're used up.
For those who supply their own reusable shopping bags, the store donates 5 cents per customer to Habitat for Humanity. From June to December last year, those donations added up to $15,000.
Even retailing behemoth Wal-Mart, with 64 Colorado stores, is observing Earth Day by giving away 1 million reusable shopping bags at its U.S. stores today.
In response to growing public demand for environmental accountability, the Stapleton Wal-Mart store initiated a pilot program early this month in which customers are asked at checkout if they would like to purchase a reusable, $1 shopping bag. So far, the program is a whopping success: Wal-Mart spokesman Josh Phair said sales of the reusable bags at the Stapleton store have doubled since the program started.
The pilot program will be tweaked and eventually put into place in all Colorado Wal-Mart stores, Phair said.
Expect other major retailers to follow the lead of Wal-Mart with their own environmentally friendly programs. Major Denver grocers including King Soopers, Safeway and Albertson's give a checkout choice between paper and plastic, and all offer a credit if customers supply their own bags.
Paper or plastic: How Denver supermarkets do it:
King Soopers
* Customers can choose between paper and plastic at checkout.
* Reusable cloth bags are sold at all stores for 99 cents; reusable insulated bags for frozen items are $2.99.
* A refund of 5 cents is given for each bag provided by the customer at checkout.
* Recycling bins for plastic bags have been put in all metro King Soopers stores. More than 7 million plastic bags have been recycled since the bins were placed last October.
Safeway and Albertson's
* Customers can choose between paper and plastic at checkout.
* A refund of 5 cents is given for each bag provided by the customer at checkout.
* Recycling bins for plastic bags have been placed in all stores in the metro area.
When the new Wal-Mart Supercenter opened in Columbia earlier this fall, it provided job opportunities for more than 200 people...
