Joyce Offerman’s shopping cart is filled with reusable bags at Giant Eagle on Oct. 14, 2023, in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood.
Benjamin B. Braun/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS
PITTSBURGH — On the first morning of Pittsburgh’s ban on single-use plastic shopping bags, Betina Stamper pushed her cart through a Giant Eagle parking lot loaded with loose groceries. When she gets to her nearby North Side home, she said, she’d haul in the supplies, most packaged in plastic, in her arms.
“I think [the ban on bags] is a bit much, considering all the other things in plastic that we’re not getting rid of,” she said earlier this month. “Plastic bottles, plastic containers. [They’re] saying get rid of the bags, that’s the most important thing that’s in the garbage. And it’s not.”
Delayed since 2021, the Pittsburgh bag ban is part of a slow-moving nationwide trend away from the free distribution of shopping bags.
Those made of forever chemicals and designed for single use usually end up lying forever in landfills or sailing in the wind until touching down as litter.
For years, reusable carry-in shopping bags, usually made of another type of plastic, have been sold at stores starting at $1.
Paper shopping bags, the traditional brown, folding flat-bottom sacks and those with handles or drawstrings, are still available at Pittsburgh stores for the convenience of customers. For a fee.
Stamper said that a day before the ban, she would have easily toted the groceries into her home in the familiar plastic bags.
“They take away the plastic and want me to pay 10 cents for each paper bag? I’m already paying for the food and that’s as expensive as ever,” she said.
Some Pittsburgh shoppers interviewed said they like the new directive.
Joyce Hofferman, for example, said she’s been using carry-in bags since the pandemic in 2020.
“I started using the self-checkout, too, so there were less people touching my food,” she said. “So this is not new for me. My husband is from Holland, and [there] you bring your own bags. We keep bags in every car. It’s no big deal.”
Hofferman said having fewer plastic shopping bags on the planet is good for the environment. There may be alternative options for bagging groceries, she said, but she hasn’t given them much thought.
“That’s probably [costing] more money than me buying a bag for $1 and I keep it forever,” she said.
Aidan Girduckis lives outside city limits. In a Pittsburgh Giant Eagle store, standing next to a sales rack filled with neatly folded carry-in bags, he said losing the free bag convenience won’t keep him from shopping in the city.
“I think it’s great that we can use this,” he said. “I love them. They’re reusable, you can use them all the time. And if you buy more stuff, you can always buy more bags.”
The original idea of giving customers free grocery bags started in the decades after the Civil War as grocery stores battled each other for customers. New mass-production machines improved the original paper bag design, making the sacks cheaper to manufacture and more practical.
In 1965, a Swedish company molded high-density polyethylene — the same chemical used to make plastic bottles and artificial lumber — into a tube sealed at the bottom, open at the top and designed with handles for convenient toting.
ExxonMobile brought the cheap and effective bags to the United States in the late 1970s. Plastic shopping bags became a threat to the paper bag industry in 1982, when two of the biggest supermarket chains, Kroger and Safeway, dropped the paper bag and went plastic.
Almost immediately the bags’ environmental impact was challenged, but it took decades for the anti-plastic bag movement to build up steam. They were on their way out in Europe by the early 2000s, and American cities slowly began embracing the idea.
Philadelphia started enforcing a plastic bag ban in 2021, about the same time a similar Pittsburgh ordinance was tabled while an enforcement clause was added. Violations in Pittsburgh will draw a written warning, but could escalate to a $250 fine.
“It’s an easy thing to vote yes on. It makes people happy to think they’re saving the dolphins and saving the seals,” said Shawn Schaffer. “To tell you the truth, I’m going to miss the damned things. I use those bags — reuse them — for regular garbage.”
His cart filled with paper bags, Schaffer said he doesn’t mind the 10-cent fee.
“I’ve been lugging paper bags up and down these streets all my life,” he said. “I’m from Squirrel Hill.”
