Basalt, CO Bags Reusable Tote Title
Posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009
In Basalt, Colo., canvas is the clear choice over paper or plastic.
The small town of 2,681 residents at the confluence of the Roaring Fork and Frying Pan rivers is the winner of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns 2009 Reusable Bag Challenge. Basalt bested 30 other mountain towns in the West as its citizens used the most reusable grocery tote bags per capita between March 1 and Sept. 1. The town’s grocery stores recorded more than 153,000 uses of canvas or cloth bags during the six months of the challenge. Because each reusable sack can hold about 2.5 times the amount of groceries than a disposable plastic bag, that means Basalt saved nearly 383,000 plastic bags from being used.
Granby, Colo., which teamed with nearby Fraser and Winter Park for the challenge, placed second, while Summit County, Colo., (Dillon, Silverthorne, Frisco and Breckenridge) took third. Our home valley, Jackson Hole, placed eighth in the per-capita rankings.
In all, the 31 participating communities saved nearly 5.3 million plastic bags from being used. That’s more than 1 million kg of carbon dioxide that won’t be produced.
“The results are better then I projected, and the project has received some impressive attention,” said organizer David Allen of Telluride.
Basalt wins a $10,000 installation of solar panels for one of its schools, powerful enough to generate 1.5 kilowatts of electricity. Alpine Bank and PCL Construction put up the award money, with parts and labor provided at cost by Independent Power Systems of Boulder. The Granby-Fraser-Winter Park team will receive $1,000 from Safeway toward establishing a plastic bag recycling program.
Litter and degradation of resources were the primary reasons why Allen created the CAST challenge. In the United States alone, annual production of disposable grocery bags emits nearly 4 million tons of CO2-equivalent. An estimated 4 billion plastic bags worldwide end up as litter every year — enough that, tied end to end, the bags could circle the Earth 63 times.
The top finishers (based on per-capita bag usage, not the total number of bags saved):
When not editing The Mountain Culture, Jim Stanford can be found running the Snake River and publishing JH Underground.
