My goal for this quarter was to avoid using any plastic and paper bags provided by the grocery store. I realized that through the course of this school year, I have collected an enormous number of plastic grocery bags. I rarely reused them and when I did, it was usually as a seat cover for my bike when it rained. This usually meant that the bag got thrown away once I got to class since it was wet and muddy. Even though the bag did get reused, it ended up in the trash only after two uses.
Instead of being wasteful, I decided to bring my own cloth bags to the grocery store. This was not easy at first. Often, I would forget (remember once I got to my car) and have to run back to my apartment to get the cloth bags. Or, I would forget them completely until I actually got to the grocery store or I would only remember that I didn’t bring them when I reached the checkout lane. One of the biggest reasons why I couldn’t remember to bring the bags was because I was just too lazy to replace the bags back in my car once I’ve unloaded my groceries. (So I would forget to grab my bags the next time I walked out of my house to go to the grocery store) Why was I too lazy? I live in an apartment, which means I have already made a few trips to my car to get all of my groceries, and to replace the bags back in my car would mean an additional trip to my car that was parked far away from my house. There was no incentive or motivation (besides thinking that I was saving the planet) for making that extra trip or giving the extra effort to remember my bags.
I talked to a few people who live in similar conditions (apartments where you park your car no where near your apartment). They shared the same sentiments…they were usually too lazy to put the cloth bags back in their car and as a result, forgot their bags on the next trip to the grocery store.
So I thought about the problem. There was no trigger / no motivation / no incentive to bring your cloth bag. What could I do to make sure I (and people like me) didn’t forget to bring their bags to the grocery store? There were a number of solutions I thought about:
- making a big bag (for ladies) that could function as a purse and could fold out to a larger bag for groceries. The problem with this: do men really want to carry around a ‘purse’ or man bag? probably not. Do ladies really want such a large bag that they can fit all of their groceries in? probably not. this needs to be refined a bit more before it could go into use. It has potential though, since big bags are in and ladies do like to accesorize…
- building a sensor in the bag and house to beep and indicate to you when you have left the house with the bags inside. The problem is that it could get annoying and it would have to be an incredibly smart system to know when you were leaving to get groceries…unless you operated like a robot on a very set schedule.
- building a shopping cart into the back of your SUV so that you can take it out, push it into the grocery store and bring it back to your house without even needing bags
- Don’t go to the grocery store…have the grocery store come to you…like the Taco truck or the ice cream truck!
- make lots of little trips to the grocery store so that you could hold everything you bought with your hands or pockets…this would be incredibly inefficient…’
- charging people for using plastic bags (this is already being done in SF)
- And the winner: building the Safeway card into the bag so that I could only save money by bringing the bag. So, you will remember your bag when you go to the grocery store.
Here’s the idea: Whenever you sign up for a Safeway card, you receive a bag with the card built into it. When you need more bags, you can request (and perhaps pay a nominal fee for them) with the same Safeway card / number in the bag. This would be initially targeted towards people aged 22 – 30 because this age group tends to live in apartments (since housing is so expensive). The incentive of saving money while shopping (or the fear of having to pay full price for groceries if you don’t bring your bag) seemed to be enough (for me and for the people I tested my prototype on) to remember to bring my own cloth bags.
I know that this may not seem ‘out there’ enough or ‘original’ enough. But, we’re talking about changing people’s behaviors here to grocery shopping, and it’s difficult to easily and seamlessly reinvent the grocery shopping experience. People seem to be creatures of habit and function better when their lives get disrupted as little as possible (I’m sure there are plenty of arguments otherwise). Additionally, I wanted to create a prototype that I could tangibly test on people and have them use. I figured that a simple, not as out there, prototype that could be tested would be better than just speculation from talking to people, since we learned that the only way we could really gain insight into people’s behavior is to observe them. I gave my cloth bag with the cardholder to people to try and it worked. They remembered their bags because they knew it was the only way they could get their Safeway Club savings. The money saving incentive was enough for the users to a) remember their bags on the way to the grocery store or b) make the extra trip to their cars to replace the bags for the next trip to the grocery store.
So, what if everyone between the ages of 22 – 30 brought their own bags to the grocery store? What sort of impact would this have? Let’s calculate.
- Americans use 100 Billion plastic bags per year.
- This averages out to roughly 330 per person per year.
- Let’s assume that 90% of those bags are used for groceries.
- So, one person will use ~300 plastic bags per year.
- There are 42,000,000 people between the ages of 22-30
- Safeway has 20% market share, so
- 8,400,000 people in the age group shop at Safeway.
If everyone who shopped at safeway (between 22 – 30 yrs) brought their own bags instead of using Safeway plastic grocery bags, they could save 2,520,000,000 plastic bags / year!!!
So, what are we saving?
- It takes ~60,500 barrels of oil to manufacture 2,520,000,000 plastic bags
- 1 barrel of oil produces 317 kg of CO2
- 60,500 barrels of oil produces ~96 million kg of CO2.
- Moreover, only 1-4% of plastic bags get recycled so if we would be saving almost all 2,252,000,000 bags from landfills and random places on earth.
So, Bring Your Own Bag…it’s not that hard!
