By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Plastic shopping bags have been nicknamed the “Arkansas tumbleweed” because of the way they drift across the landscape in the wind. If more retailers follow the example set by one national chain, there might be fewer of them tumbling.

Kroger last Thursday announced it will begin phasing out the plastic bags companywide, starting with its Seattle-based QFC division by next year. The transition to reusable bags in other parts of the company will last until 2025.

It probably will take that long to reach the stores in Arkansas. Old ways die hard, even when people have good intentions. The Brawner household is trying to reduce its plastic use, but numerous times I’ve found myself behind a shopping cart and realizing I’d left the reusable bags at home. Lately I’ve been skipping bags entirely on short trips when I forget. I don’t need a plastic bag to carry my lettuce that comes in a plastic bag.

The other challenge will be that the American consumer does not like to be inconvenienced or asked to sacrifice anything – at all. In 2006, PepsiCo introduced a biodegradable bag for its Sun Chips that was much better for the environment than traditional plastic bags. However, the bags were noisier, and sales fell. The company responded by producing a quieter biodegradable bag.

Kroger is taking a risk with this effort. Like PepsiCo, whatever good publicity it creates could be followed by a consumer revolt. We’ve all grown quite accustomed to those free plastic bags, some of which we reuse for other purposes.

Still, hopefully this will become a trend. Humankind is producing a lot of plastic, and it’s not good for the environment or for us.

It’s hard to imagine today, but there was very little plastic in the world until 1950. Now it’s littering every corner of the globe, including uninhabited ones. According to National Geographic, humans produced 448 million tons in 2015. Coca-Cola by itself produces 128 billion plastic bottles a year. Americans discard 500 million plastic straws each day. Eighteen percent of plastics globally are recycled, but the United States only manages 9 percent. Still, that’s an improvement over 1980, when almost no plastic was recycled.

As for those plastic shopping bags, a trillion are used worldwide each year – 100 billion of them in the United States. Even those that are recycled or thrown away can blow out of a container or trash truck and become an Arkansas tumbleweed.

Meanwhile, millions of tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year, much of it produced in developing Asian countries. There’s a 600,000-square-mile area, twice the size of Texas, between Hawaii and California where floating plastic gathers through ocean currents. It’s called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it’s the largest of five such patches across the globe.

The worst part of this story is that discarded plastic doesn’t really go away. Experts have estimated it can take 450 years or maybe forever for it disintegrate. Instead of biodegrading, it becomes smaller pieces of plastic consumed by birds and fish and therefore eventually by us. It’s unclear how much this can harm us, but it can’t be good.

Hopefully, the response to the plastic problem doesn’t become a liberal vs. conservative debate, in the way that climate change unnecessarily became. It’s inarguable that enormous amounts of plastic are littering the environment. We can see it in the water, the beaches, and everywhere else. The next time you drive to your grocery store, glance to the side of the road. The plastic trash you see there will exist for a long time. If a plastic bag or water bottle had blown from George Washington’s carriage, parts of it would still be around.

One last thing about the shopping bags: You know they’re not “free,” right, just like parking isn’t “free”? It’s a cost of doing business that stores add to the price of our stuff.

Those bags have other societal costs, too – disposing them in landfills, cleaning them up when they’re not disposed of properly, and, eventually, responding to the problems caused by not cleaning them up. Arkansas becomes a less beautiful place when the landscape is marred by plastic tumbleweeds.

I can’t save the planet, but I can reduce those costs, starting with my grocery store trips. At the very least, I don’t need to carry a plastic bag of lettuce inside another plastic bag.

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.