The First State’s stricter plastic grocery bag went into effect at the beginning of the month.
Shoppers are now encouraged to BYOB, bring your own bag, as part of an environmental initiative to reduce waste on road and waterways and reduce the amount of plastic bags that end up discarded at recycling facilities.
Most stores like Food Lion, Acme and Walmart now offer some variation of a brown paper bag instead of plastic, but many Delawareans started bringing their own bags months ago, like Katie Kohr from Dover. At an Acme in Smyrna, she says the paper bags are not great either.
“So I just bring my own," she says. "I clean them every once in a while, and it doesn’t bother me a bit... It's not an inconvenience once you get used to it.”
Cheswold Resident Diane Kurtz has been bringing her own bags since she says Delaware “threatened” to take the plastic bags away, and she thinks they should be allowed.
“Some customers leave home and don’t have [bags] with them," Kurtz said. "So they get here and they have to buy bags and it’s a back and forth thing.”
In Camden, several customers were dissatisfied with Walmart’s new bag style, a shallow paper bag with thin, reinforced handles. For people like Camden resident Natasha Lamadine, who had a lot of items in her cart on Monday morning, the bags are insufficient, so she ended up buying four new reusable ones.
“Considering that they’re a very inexpensive store, they should have larger bags just so people could get the items out because people prefer to come to Walmart because they can get more bang for their buck. But if I have to fight remembering to bring a bag, it’s a waste.”
Dover resident Dylanee Diaz isn’t sure how the initiative is fully benefiting the environment.
“I don’t know how I feel about it because paper bags," she says. "I mean you’re cutting down more trees to use paper bags, so how is it helping in the long run? They’re still being used up and thrown away.”
She says she’d still rather use her own bags, when she remembers to bring them.
Remembering to bring a reusable bag is a common complaint from shoppers – the alternative is risking their groceries in a paper bag, which some say often break before they make it to their cars.
Felton resident RoseMarie Milne says it’s high time plastic bags are done away with. Milne previously lived in Germany, where reusable bags are the norm. She says America can’t afford to do any more damage to the environment than it’s already done.
