Green bagging it

>> Oasis Bags pushes to make shopping an
eco-friendly and non-toxic experience

THROW AWAY BUT WITHOUT THE GUILT: Catherine Gremeaux

by MELANIE MELOCHE-HOLUBOWSKI

If a 20-cent tax on plastic bags, as the Quebec government is considering imposing come the fall, is not enough to change consumers’ grocery-polluting habits, maybe corn-based grocery bags will ease Quebec’s landfills. Some shops and larger companies are taking a green initiative and replacing the polluting bags with cotton and corn-based bags.

Oasis Bags, a Vaudreuil-Dorion—based company, has been distributing millions of ecologically friendly bags across the province since 1989. “The owner was laughed at when they began,” says Catherine Gremeaux from Oasis Bags. “No one thought that people would buy recyclable or reusable bags.” It took almost 20 years, but people are starting to change their minds about their consuming habits.

The company began with a series of cotton bags and has evolved to polypropylene and mesh bags. The cotton bags are made from 100 per cent natural unbleached cotton. There’s also an organic cotton option. The polypropylene bags contain a minimum of 30 per cent recycled materials and are themselves recyclable and degradable. Mesh bags are most commonly used in stores and are composed of a polyester-nylon material. The company insists on using non-toxic by-products. Oasis Bags was the first North American company to be certified EcoLogo, the Canadian government’s green labelling mark.

These days, the company is selling bags to both larger chain stores like Jacob and Aldo, and to smaller boutiques and stores. Montreal communications agency Celcius bought a series of recyclable bags from the company for a promotional campaign for the dairy product company Danone. “The company insists a lot on using environmentally-friendly products. We distributed a new yogurt using these bags, and even used biodegradable spoons,” says Mireille Azema, Celcius’s project director.

Quebecers use between one and two billion bags a year, and the province’s landfills receive nearly 15,000 tons of bags annually. “Sadly, only 10 per cent of bags are recycled. Many people don’t even know that plastic bags can be recycled,” says Gremeaux. “People are slowly starting to wake up to the necessity of protecting the environment. If people are taxed for plastic bags, they will rethink their choices and ask for ecological bags.”

Gremeaux knows it is hard for consumers to change their habits, but she says that when companies offer cheap, convenient solutions, people will find the transition easy. “We still live in a consumer, throw-away society. Every day, I see bags everywhere in the streets.”

She says the cotton bags that are sold are often too expensive and shoppers tend to overlook them. And even when they are bought, they aren’t always used. “A lot of people tend to forget their cotton bags at home or in the car,” says Gremeaux.

The newest ecological bag they are selling is a corn-based bag that looks exactly like the more polluting plastic bags. The corn bags take one to two years to decompose, compared to nearly 400 years for a plastic bag. Also, with the suggested “plastax,” Gremeaux says grocery stores will have to adopt corn-based bags. “At three cents a bag, people and stores have no excuse not to use these.”

Gremeaux joined Oasis Bags because she liked the idea of working for a company that tries to be environmentally friendly. “We like to think that by changing companies’ and people’s habits, we can make a little difference,” says Gremeaux.