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Walmart Bringing Up a Brand New BagLock Icon

2 min read

Zach Freeze said that Walmart Inc. of Bentonville is serious about its sustainability and recycling initiatives (see Leveraging Its Partnerships, Walmart Goes ‘Regenerative’.)

Freeze, the company’s senior director for sustainability, said reducing the proliferation of the convenient and easy-to-carry plastic grocery bag is an important step. Walmart is one of the founding partners of the Beyond the Bag Challenge, an innovation contest to find a new and better way to carry groceries.

Submissions for the contest closed earlier this month and the winners of the $1 million prize are expected to be announced in January.

“We know there is a reusable model that could be more effective and would meet our customers’ needs,” Freeze said.

Research shows that plastic bags, while super convenient, are a terrible idea for the planet’s health. Walmart said the average use of a bag is 12 minutes and 100 billion of them are used annually; unfortunately, only 5% are recycled.

A plastic bag may take as long as 400 years to decompose.

Freeze said Walmart has return bins at the front of its stores for people to recycle bags and the company’s new Walmart+ program allows shoppers to take their carts directly to their cars without using bags.

At a 5% return rate — either at a store or home recycling — it’s clear that too many aren’t getting the message about recycling their plastic bags.

“With our own plastic bags we have worked to have more recycled content and we take them back in our stores,” Freeze said. “Reusables play a big role. We have tried to make that more front-and-center with reusable bags with low price points of under $1. We obviously want to encourage that to happen.”

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