That's My Bag, Baby

An update on how Ashley is doing in her pursuit of breaking up with plastic bags...

My quest for the What You Can Do challenge is to shop "greener" by using reusable shopping bags instead of carrying home groceries in new plastic bags. I feel somewhat justified taking plastic bags occasionally to pick up after my dog, but certainly don't need the 50 bags currently sitting in my pantry. And even though I have plenty of reusable shopping bags, they spend most of their time collecting dust in the closet. I read somewhere that it takes three weeks to start a new habit, which means I've got a long way to go towards smarter shopping. In the past, I haven't even been able to remember my reusable bags on back-to-back shopping trips.

On Day One of the challenge, I grabbed four reusable bags from the depths of my closet and placed them securely in my car's trunk. After a quick workout at the gym, I headed to the grocery store and completely forgot to bring in the bags with me. As I was swiping my credit card at the check out, I realized that hiding bags in my trunk was not the way to accomplish my goal of environmentally savvy shopping.

Since then, my success rate of bringing bags to the store is about 50%. I also discovered other opportunities to reduce waste by carrying my own bags to the mall (not sure its going to happen) and drugstore. My goal for this week is to clean out my cluttered pantry by taking plastic/paper bags to the recycling center at my grocery store. And so I can successfully create a new environmentally friendly habit in the next three weeks, my reusable bags will be riding shotgun.