New Pi ready to eliminate plastic grocery bags at all stores
Zach Berg | Iowa City Press-Citizen 5:08 p.m. CDT July 31, 2015 Facebook Twitter Email
Plastic grocery bags will soon be a thing of the past at all New Pioneer Food Co-op stores.
New Pioneer announced Friday that by the end of August, plastic grocery bags will be eliminated at the company’s three stores in Iowa City, Coralville and Cedar Rapids.
New Pi’s marketing manager Jenifer Angerer said Friday that the three stores all have plastic grocery bags stocked and ready to carry groceries, but that the stores will no longer purchase plastic bags after they run out of their current stock.
Angerer estimated that all stores would run out of plastic bags by the third week of August. “That gives us some time to educate our customers about our plan,” she said.
Angerer said paper bags still will be available at checkout, and the small plastics bags that usually hold produce would still be in store because they are compostable.
The move represents a new phase of the grocer’s plan to limit its environmental impact, Angerer said. For 25 years, Angerer said, the stores have offered customers 5 cents if they bring their own reusable bags. Six years ago, the stores began charging 5 cents for each bag — plastic or paper — the customer used.
More than 50 percent of the co-op’s customers already use reusable bags, Angerer said, but co-op officials knew when they began to charge customers for bags that they would someday stop offering plastic bags altogether.
“When it comes to paper vs. plastic, their negative impact on the environment during their creation is pretty even, but it’s the plastic bag’s impact on the environment after they are used that really made us focus on getting rid of plastic,” Angerer said.
Mary Kirkpatrick, a member of the 100 Grannies environmental group that worked with New Pi on the decision, said that plastic bags often slip into the environment, clog waterways, strangle wildlife and pack landfills and garbage patches that float in various oceans.
“People have to take responsibility and start using reusable bags if they want to help better the environment,” Kirkpatrick said.
Kirkpatrick said that the 100 Grannies ultimate goal was for the Iowa City Council to pass an ordinance banning plastic bags from being used at all grocery stories, but that she was “delighted” when she got the news from New Pi.
For Hy-Vee, the area’s largest grocer, the topic of getting rid of plastic bags “has not been discussed,” Ryan Roberts, store director at Iowa City’s First Avenue Hy-Vee, said Friday.
“We have bins at every store where people can drop off their plastic bags. A lot of the bags are recycled and made into things like park equipment,” Roberts said. “But within the Hy-Vee community, getting rid of plastic bags hasn’t been discussed.”
Lynda Leidiger, a shopper at the Iowa City New Pi store, said Friday she is in favor of New Pi’s move.
“Anything that encourages people to use cloth bags is fine by me,” Leidiger said, with the cloth bag she got from New Pi on Earth Day five years ago in hand.
Angerer said New Pi likely will hand out free cloth bags again in August, but was not certain when.
Mary Mahaffa, another shopper the Iowa City New Pi, said she doesn’t mind using paper, but that she wishes the store would keep a couple plastic bags at checkout because “sometimes the bottles of maple syrup leak a little and they get sticky.”
“Hopefully, this will raise awareness on the dangers of plastic bags,” Angerer said. “The states that boarder the ocean are already aware. California cities have already banned the use of plastic bags. We don’t have an ocean, but we have a river and that’s worth protecting.”
Reach Zach Berg at 319-887-5412, zberg@press-citizen.com, or follow him on Twitter at @ZacharyBerg.