Mountain Equipment Co-Op, or MEC, is well known by any Canadian who loves to camp, hike, ski or go on adventures. The 34-year-old retailer has 10 stores across Canada, mail-order and e-commerce operations, and as the country’s largest retail co-operative — i.e. its customers are shareholders — it has attracted more than 2.2 million members.

Today, MEC announced that over the next six months it will phase in “BioBag” shopping bags into all its stores, which together go through more than half a million shopping bags a year that — like most plastic shopping bags — end up in landfills and can pose a threat to birds and marine animals.

What is a BioBag? It’s a “plastic” bag made of corn and synthetic polymers that can be recycled or, if put in compost, will biodegrade over 10 to 45 days with no harm to the environment. The bags are an innovation of Polar Gruppen As of Norway, which has licensed BioBag Canada Inc. to sell the product in Canada. BioBags are available in about a dozen countries now and more than 10 million European citizens use them. In addition to shopping bags, Polar Gruppen also produces biodegradable doggy poop bags, garden/agricultural film, food industry and other packaging, and even disposable biodegradeable diapers.

I’m not entirely sure how much of a premium MEC will pay to use these bags, but kudos to the company for setting an example for other retailers to follow. I would love to see these bags in grocery stores. And while they would likely come at a premium, I’m sure many consumers would be willing to pay a little extra — either directly for the bags or indirectly through slightly higher grocery prices. Price Chopper, for example, already charges 5 cents for shopping bags in an effort to encourage re-use of bags. Why not replace these bags with BioBags, or add them as an option, and charge accordingly?

This isn’t necessarily an example of a cleantech product that is better and more affordable than what it’s intended to replace, but it is an example of a product that pays for itself through the benefit that comes from green marketing. We’ve seen it with organic foods. We’re starting to see it with businesses that promote their use of higher-cost green power. So why not BioBags?

I don’t know about you, but I find it kind of gross that there are millions of plastic bags filled with dog poop sitting in landfills and not decomposing… get my drift?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Main Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.