Bag That One
I had started seeing the figure of four cents apiece given as the cost of a plastic grocery bag, and since that seemed high to me, so I decided to do a little fact-checking.
At ask.com, I asked the price of a plastic grocery bag. There was no direct answer, just a lot of links, a la Google. One of them, I could see in the top excerpt, had that four cents figure in it.
But I was looking for something else: an online wholesaler from which a store could buy such plastic bags. I didn’t have to go far: there were scads of suppliers, one of which, BagsOnNet.com, seemed businesslike enough to get a probable rough estimate.
They listed quite a few plastic bags, from sandwich to garbage, but the regular size “tee shirt” bag seemed like the right one (12x6x22). Two types were available, a brown “Thank You” bag for $16.99 per thousand, and a white Happy Face bag for $18.99 per thousand. Choosing the latter, to arrive at a conservative (high) estimate of the cost, I went to shipping costs. That was determined by UPS. Nothing said how much 1,000 such bags weighed, packaged, so I put the figure of 10 pounds in their calculator, and got a shipping cost to Middlebury, Vermont of $8.70. If the bags weighed five pounds, they would cost $8.04 for the tightest ship in the shipping business to deliver them. Weight was clearly less a factor than having to make the trip at all—the transportation industry’s version of Woody Allen’s principle that “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
Arithmetic arrived at a total cost of $27.69. Dividing that by 1,000, my calculator and my graded-school method (thank you, Miss Needham, wherever you aren’t) both arrived at a per-bag cost of $02.77 cents per bag—less than three cents.
A store would probably order more than one package of 1,000, and would either do some comparison shopping or, in the case of a large chain, either do some bargaining or acquire a bagmaker and get the things at a figure closer to the cost of production. So my fact-checking conclusion is that the cost of a plastic bag is less than three cents for a store of any significance, and probably two cents or less for the franchise stores at which most of the shopping is done.
That’s a high enough cost, multiplied by millions of consumers, for me to get serious about bringing a canvas bag shopping more often. But not always: we use the paper bags to store and put out our paper recyclables (Middlebury has municipal recycling, and you’re billed for it whether you use it or not, so it behooves you to use it) so as often as not, we ask for paper rather than plastic. Heaven knows what those things cost, and how many trees. I’ll dig into that another day.
But four cents for plastic is an environmentalist piety, not a fact. Bag that one.
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