The Brookyn Paper calls it an environmental triumph. Unlike OTBKB, BP’s editor Gersh Kuntzman stayed until the end of the meeting. So he got the scoop.
In one of the most lopsided votes since the re-election of Chairman Mao in 1954, members of Brooklyn’s famously progressive supermarket, the Park Slope Food Co-op, voted nearly unanimously on Tuesday night to stop making plastic shopping bags available at the checkout counter.
In doing so, the 14,000-member grocery store is now in good company with bag-banning locales like Rwanda, Uganda, Bangladesh, China, San Francisco and the Republic of Whole Foods.
It was the second environmental triumph for the Co-op in as many months; in April, the Union Street supermarket voted to stop selling bottled water.
In both cases, the well-being of the planet was cited as the motivation — like water bottles, plastic bags are made from petroleum — and the notion of customer convenience was dismissed.
(Full disclosure: I’m not only The Brooklyn Paper’s Park Slope Food Co-op beat reporter; I’m also a member.)
“I will be so happy to see the plastic bags gone, gone, gone!” said Jane Bayer, a 34-year member of the Co-op, using her allotted three minutes at the Tuesday night meeting to thunder against America’s “addiction” to the thin-plastic bags.
“We don’t need them. Some people say they reuse them, but how many times? Once, twice? That’s no big savings. It will be hard to give up plastic bags, but we can do it. We don’t need them! We can do it! It should be done. It must be done.”
It was a night of passion, persuasion and props.
I’m a member too. I have a feeling that plastic bags will still be available in the produce area, and in the bulk foods area. And all the dried fruit and spices and cheeses will still be wrapped in plastic right there in the co-op. So it’s all relative.