The supermarket girl checked my quart of milk through the barcode scanner and the price, size and even the advertised special (20 cents off – shopper’s club members only) showed on the display pole. Her eyes seemed to be in some faraway place, her body doing the work like an automaton. Work, I am sure, she was quite used to doing, repeated time after time, day after day. Swipe the items across the scanner, place them in the bag, read the total. “That will be one oh eight – with tax.”

I bought one quart of milk – needed for tomorrow’s breakfast. Any more shopping can wait till the weekend; two days away.

The checkout girl put my quart of milk in one of those poly supermarket bags. I neglected to bring my reusable bags since it wasn’t officially a shopping trip – just picking up an item to get us through the rest of the week. The girl then lifted the bag from its holder with my quart of milk in it. I thought she was going to hand it to me.
Wrong! She dropped it in another bag then took that from its holder and handed it to me

Double-bagged! Only one quart of milk!

I didn’t know what to say. Was it store policy to double bag every order no matter how small? Maybe she was still off in that faraway place I saw in her eyes when I got to her station. Maybe she thought she was being generous.

I looked up and down the row of check-out counters. At each station industrious young attendants obligingly double-bagged every order, small or large.

It felt like I was having a double-bagging nightmare.
I recalled the statistics on poly bags; between 500 BILLION and one TRILLION bags used yearly! (worldwide)
The nightmare was real.

“Hold up a moment,” I told the check-out girl. It’s only one quart, I don’t need it double-bagged.”

She took it out of the second bag and tried to hand it to me again. I stopped her again. “You know what – I don’t even need the one bag. I’ll carry it just as it is.”
That became a rule for me. If I don’t have the reusable cloth bags with me, I carry my purchases without a bag whenever I can. Two, three and even four items. It really isn’t too difficult to forego the bag.

If anyone begins to refute the effort with, “it’s only one bag,” or “what difference can one bag make?” then they missed the whole point of environmental concern. It’s each one of our little bits, the one bag here and the piece of litter there and the small amount of fumes from one gas guzzler that adds up to the Trillion bags yearly or trash strewn highways or an atmosphere we once easily breathed causing spikes on a chart of new asthma cases.

Like so many of the winning strategies to clean up our environment, it takes very little effort and yet yields important results.

The slogan worked well in the war on drugs, Just Say No. Let’s adopt it to poly bags or any unnecessary plastic. Just say “No Plastic.”

Pass it on. Spread the word. This, too, is a war; one we have to win. Say “No Plastic.”