Plastic bags have been in the news this week, as Santa Cruz banned stores from giving people plastic bags to carry home their purchases. We have had a few comments from CSA subscribers about the plastic liner bags that we use in the CSA boxes, wondering why we use them. This is a topic that we have thought a lot about and have actually reduced our packaging a lot in the past year. We wish it were as easy as eliminating the plastic bags altogether, but have found that the issue is more complicated than that. We appreciate that our members are concerned about the environment and want to explain the purpose and benefits of the plastic bags that we use.
First, the primary purpose of the liner bag is not for people to be able to carry their produce home easily (though this also has an environmental benefit — see below). The bag actually does an impressive job of keeping the produce fresh in the boxes during the delivery day. The produce is picked, generally the day before delivery, washed and kept in the cooler overnight. When we pack for the CSA early in the morning, the produce comes from the cooler with some water from the washing still clinging to it. The perforated liner bag keeps the produce moist and cool through the day, even if you end up picking up your veggies late that evening. We want your produce to be as fresh and full of nutrients as when we picked it, and vegetables can wilt quickly if they are not kept moist. Adding the liner bag to our boxes several years ago led to a vast improvement in the quality of the produce that our subscribers receive and we are unwilling to give up this benefit.
Believe it or not, the plastic bags have a compelling environmental argument going for them as well. When we started using the liner bags in the boxes, we cut down on our largest source of packaging waste, the boxes. We are now able to reuse the boxes nearly twice as many times before they become too weak to stack, because they are protected by the bags. Also, before the liner bags, we recovered far fewer boxes back from the pick-up sites (people were more likely to take the boxes home). I have not done the calculations, but I would be very surprised if on balance, the plastic bags don’t come out orders of magnitude better environmentally, when you take into consideration the resources, energy use and resulting pollution to create the boxes and dispose of them. From the cost standpoint the plastic bags are a real winner, as the boxes cost us more than $1.25 each, compared to just pennies for a bag.
Consider this: Even with our plastic liner bags and the plastic portioning bags we use for salad mix and occasional other vulnerable items, receiving your vegetables this way almost certainly uses less plastic and other packaging than buying them from the store. The produce industry uses packaging to transport the vegetables to the store, at which point the original packaging is thrown away and then the store or the consumer puts the vegetables in another bag in the produce section of the store. To get the equivalent amount of produce from the store, you might end up using 5 or 6 plastic bags, even if they go in a paper or cloth bag at the checkout counter. In the wholesale trade, a single use of the waxed boxes like the ones we use is the norm to take the produce to the store or distributor. We get an average of 15 uses out them. To extend the environmental comparison further, there are of course the energy savings from vastly cutting down the average number of miles your vegetables have traveled to reach you.
While we are unwilling to part with the liner bag for all these reasons, we have made a lot of progress in cutting down our use of the portioning bags within the box. We cut our use of plastic portioning bags about in half from 2010 to 2011. Some items still go in a plastic bag, like the salad mix and broccoli di cicco this week, to keep them contained or protected. But the liner bag helps us to be able to do without individual bags for many vegetables, and whenever it is feasible we put items either bunched or loose, like the celery root this week.
You can help us save resources by carefully folding your boxes and leaving them neatly stacked at the pick-up sites. (Be careful not to tear the tabs when collapsing the box. The best method is to turn the empty box upside down, grasp the edges of the box bottom with your fingers, and use your thumbs to squeeze the tabs out of the slots.) The boxes also last longer if they are stored out of the sun and weather. We also hope that you can find second uses for your plastic bags that we do give you–the perforated liner bag is good for storing many vegetables in the fridge, and the other bags can be reused in the household as you see fit.
We will keep thinking about these issues and appreciate your suggestions and feedback.
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