Advantages of Bringing Your Own Bag to The Grocery Store

Environment pollution, a warning issue! According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in 2014, Americans produced about 258 million tons of solid waste, but only about 34 percent was recycled or composed. To face this issue, a question asked by the government is how to reduce solid waste? While some people think about reusing or recycling plastic items, others try to find out a way which is easier and more effective to do. Instead of doing a lot of complicated steps to recycle, people just need to bring their own bag to the grocery store whenever they go shopping. Based on its advantages, many people agree that bringing your own bag to the grocery store is convenient, easy to reuse and easy to protect the environment. The first advantage of bringing your own bag to the grocery store is the ability to reuse. People usually throw away bags after shopping because most of them are made from cheap material, so they break easily. Different with them, the own bag is made from better material, this helps people to reuse it many times.

Depend on how dirty it is, people can reuse it in many ways. For example, you own bag gets dirty by coffee or food, you just need to wash it with water and soap. Or if you go shopping when it rains, and your own bag gets wet, the simplest way that many people think is drying and keeping on using it. Compare to the plastic bag, the own bag is always helpful because it is easy to reuse, in addition, it still has other benefits that explain why people should use it. Besides being reusable, another advantage of bringing your own bag to the grocery store is the convenience. With your own bag, you can bring a bag of the right size for the item you want to buy. For example, you want to buy a lot of tomatoes at the market, and the staff cannot put all of them in a same plastic bag, so you must carry 2 or 3 bags. This makes more difficult for you. In addition to choosing right size, you can put the own bag anywhere in your car or your home easily. You know the exact size of it, so this helps you to decide where it is appropriate to put it.

Another convenient thing is that you can put more items in the own bag than plastic bag. Because of the material of the own bag, this allows it to carry heavy goods. For instance, with a gallon vegetable oil, people usually use at least 2 plastic bags to make sure that the bag will not be broken. However, with the own bag, people can put more than a gallon vegetable oil in it. Even though convenience is a great advantage of bringing the own bag to the grocery store, many people care more about how it protects the environment. Protecting the environment is the most important advantage of bringing the own bag to the grocery store. First, it helps to reduce the environment pollution. A plastic bag can take from 15 to 1000 years to break down, it is a long time, and it releases large amounts of toxin when it decomposes into the atmosphere. Second, bringing the own bag contribute to the protection of animals. Many animals die every year because they eat plastic bag, or they live in area which is polluted by plastic bag.

According to the US Environmental Agency, up to 1 million birds, 100,000 turtles and many other sea animals die annually because of plastic bags. Therefore, using the own bag helps to reduce the number of plastic bags produced and decomposed, this can save many animals and protect our environment. With all its advantages: convenient, easy to reuse and easy to protect the environment, people should bring their own bag to the grocery store. To face the current pollution problem, cutting down solid waste is necessary. The government should ban plastic bags and show people who disagree with this idea how damaging plastic bags are. This would reduce the waste that is damaging to the environment in the future.