Every trip you make to the grocery store, you have to make a choice.

I'm not just talking about paper or plastic, but whether to get a new bag or use one of the dozens you already have stashed around.

It's a seemingly insignificant few seconds at the checkout, but multiply that moment by millions happening around the world every day, and suddenly this ordinary object becomes the subject of an extraordinary debate.

What do you do with plastic bags?

I'm Brooke Butler, and in this episode of What Do I Do With This, from checkout to forever, we're unloading the problem of plastic bags.

I don't know how many plastic bags you have around your house, but I know you have them, and I know they multiply when I'm not looking.

That's right, when I'm not looking.

Nobody really has a long-term plan for them except for my dog's poop, and I'm pretty sure I have enough to last for my next three dogs' lifetimes.

The truth is, plastic bags are one of the most common things we throw away and one of the most complicated.

We use an estimated five trillion plastic bags every year worldwide, and while they're designed for convenience, their impacts can last much longer.

I know, it's a long time.

Okay, let me just give it to you straight.

There are several places around St.

Louis that will collect your bags, send them off in a big truck where they're shipped across the country to a warehouse where maybe five percent of them are actually recycled.

So if you're looking for the short and sweet answer to what do I do with my plastic bags, you can go to this website, and they'll tell you.

But if you stick with me for just a bit, I'll tell you about some unique solutions to this massive issue happening right here in our neighborhood.

First, a group proving that one person's trash can literally become someone else's bed.

Every week at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, part of St.

Stephen Parish, volunteers gather around tables for a kind of sewing circle.

Only their material of choice?

Plastic grocery bags.

We've all become bag snobs.

All these preferred bags and colors and so on.

They've become known as the St.

Stephen Parish Plarn Patrol.

Plarn being the term for the plastic yarn they use to crochet these mats.

The mats are then donated to the St.

Patrick's Center to be distributed to those experiencing homelessness.

It's a two-fold thing.

It helps the environment, and it helps the homeless.

And it's a good way to use your plastic bags, but you know really we should be using cloth bags.

But as long as we have these, we want to keep these out of the landfill.

And so what she does is she flattens them, and then all of us do this different aspect.

But then I fold them in a certain manner, and I cut off the parts that we can't use.

Some people flatten and fold.

Some people take the flatten and fold and cut the strips.

Some people are taking the strips and weaving it together to make a long strip like plarn.

So and then you ball it up and then crochet.

We're making the plarn.

We tie the balls to make the balls of plarn.

About two of these and a little more will make our mat.

And so we all put them together, and then we crochet.

It looks beautiful too.

I'm not talented enough to do that, but I can do this.

It takes a team.

It takes a village, right?

Yes, sure.

And I keep them company.

Yeah, that's important.

And so I heard, is it one of you who like haven't had a record of like one a week?

Is that right?

Yeah, I try.

Each mat is roughly three feet by six feet, uses around 600 plastic bags, and takes several hours of labor.

In the larger context of homelessness and environmental waste, it's a modest gesture.

The mats won't solve homelessness, and they won't eliminate plastic waste.

But for the volunteers who make them, that's not really the point.

In a world of problems that can seem impossible to solve, they're choosing to make one thing they can hold in their hands.

It's a good thing to come and be a part of something that's meaningful, that we can not only, it sounds like such a trivial thing to do, but at least it's something that we can do.

If we didn't need to use them at all, it would be the greatest gift, and that's the biggest challenge.

This also isn't a new or unusual pastime, especially for church groups.

Plarn has been used for craft projects since the early 2000s, and turning it into sleeping mats has become a familiar volunteer effort in communities across the country.

Part of the appeal is practical.

Plastic bags are easy to collect, the costs are low, and the work offers volunteers a chance to gather, socialize, and create something together.

Some critics point out that there are other ways to direct time and resources toward helping people experiencing homelessness, but supporters see these mats as a practical second life for material headed for the landfill, and a simple way to provide a little extra comfort and insulation to someone spending nights outdoors.

It came as a great surprise, I think, to all of us that it's become a thing.

We've really come to enjoy each other.

This is a very good community to be part of, and I appreciate all of these people.

And anyway, we've all become bag snobs.

That's right.

It's the color that gets us involved.

The color and the weight.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, so that's the snob part.

I'll tell you my favorite bags are the Straub's bags, because they're really shiny and they're a nice green color, but you have to cut them thinner.

And they're a little bit hard to crochet, but I like how they come out.

It takes quite a long time.

We said they would be priceless if you had to put a price on them.

Think about it.

You know, you're driving down the highway, you're driving down the street, and you see plastic bags to start repurpose, but to stop using them all together would be the greatest.

Plastic bags were designed to make life easier.

The final job of a checker is one that most checkers like least, but it's also one of the most important.

The modern plastic shopping bag was patented in Sweden in 1965.

Retailers quickly embraced the bags because they were lightweight, durable, and far less expensive than paper alternatives.

By the 1980s, plastic bags had largely replaced paper bags in many supermarkets, just as public concerns about litter and pollution were beginning to grow.

Because plastic bags do not readily biodegrade and often escape waste systems into waterways and natural landscapes, these concerns eventually led countries around the world to enact some of the first plastic bag bans and restrictions in the early 2000s.

Once we're done with them, plastic bags become one of the more challenging items in our waste stream.

If you've ever tossed a plastic bag into the recycling bin and thought, good luck little buddy, well, the odds aren't great.

Most can't be recycled curbside because they interfere with equipment that sorts recyclable materials.

And despite decades of recycling campaigns, only a small fraction are ultimately recycled.

One estimate found that about 5.5 percent of plastic bags, sacks, and wraps generated in the United States were recovered through recycling.

That's why projects like PLARN are so compelling.

They're finding value in a material many systems struggle to handle.

But ultimately, reuse can only go so far.

Which raises a bigger question.

What if we could make plastic differently in the first place?

The good news of is it's normally very stable.

But the bad news is it's also very stable.

And that's actually a big issue.

That's the issue Joshua Yuan is trying to solve.

At Washington University, Yuan and his team see plastic as a valuable material in certain settings.

In the medical field, for example, plastics do a great job of keeping equipment sterile, a true matter of life or death.

Consumer goods, on the other hand, may not be as vital to be contained in plastic.

But with the widespread use, it's not as easy to change material uses.

We cannot just say we're not going to use plastics at all because there are functionality that cannot be replaced.

That's why we focus on this leaf design.

If you think about it, nature actually has this cycle.

For any material you produce from nature and then the biosphere, actually the biological system, degrades them and then they return to the soil.

That thinking led to a new material called LEAF, short for Layered Ecological Advanced and Multifunctional Film.

Just like a plant leaf, the material combines strength, moisture resistance, food-preserving barrier properties, and biodegradability.

According to the team's research, it can completely break down in soil in about five weeks and even at room temperature.

We've been doing all these different, my lab focuses on sustainability, we've been doing all these different plastic designs.

The students are actually inspired by nature and think about it and then come up with this design.

The most important thing is the inspiration from the structure.

You have a multi-layered design of sustainable material to bring in the strength, the biodegradability, the air impermeability, and then the mechanical stability so that you can use for large-scale packaging utilization.

Yeah, that's a big deal.

Yep.

Yes.

The material isn't on store shelves yet, but efforts are already underway to commercialize the technology and scale production.

But the promise behind projects like this goes beyond replacing a grocery bag or a food wrapper.

What we need to do is to come up with a solution, the economic, sustainable, scalable solution.

We are going to run out of space in our limited planet.

To put, where to put this waste?

These wastes are not degradable.

Let me put it this way.

How many, how many planets do we have?

We have only one planet.

We only have one planet, and we really need to take care of it.

For years, the conversation around plastic bags has sounded a little like a group project where one person ends up doing all the work.

Consumers get told, remember the reusable bags and somehow fix a global waste problem before checkout.

Around the world, governments have tried bans and fees.

Companies have tried recycling programs.

Some approaches have worked better than others.

Here in Missouri, though, local governments aren't even allowed to ban plastic bags or charge a fee for them.

State law says cities and counties can't impose a ban, fee, or tax on either plastic or paper bags, which means this conversation isn't just happening at the checkout line.

It's happening in state capitals.

It's happening in boardrooms and classrooms and labs.

But before anything changes, there's one thing that has to happen first.

We have to notice what we've been throwing away, and that's where art comes in.

I think of myself first and foremost as a sculptor, but I'm a socially engaged sculptor.

So everything with my work involves people.

So it's not just me being isolated in the studio trying to make something that I find aesthetically pleasing.

It is also about me meeting people, getting them involved, giving them an opportunity to help really shape the piece.

And why?

Why is that important?

Hey, it's fun.

It's so much fun.

I mean, it's maddening, but it's, it's, so what I'm doing with my work is recontextualizing plastic, meaning I am taking this very familiar material.

I mean, it's a lot of fun to run up to this and say, like, that's the orange juice I drink or my mom buys that kind of milk.

And so it brings you into this familiarity with it.

But when you, when you start collecting it at home for the work, which is part of this whole body and you start seeing those caps pile up in your house, and then you bring them to the studio and every single little contribution adds up.

So when you, when you see it all together, you really start understanding the environmental impact that our consumption patterns have on the world.

You know, in here, you're just kind of looking at the white ceiling, but as the sun sets and the sky turns, the piece is constantly changing.

It is absolutely in concert with its environment when it's outside.

For a long time, I was working with issues of global consumption, but on a much higher intellectual level.

And I kept thinking, I'm just talking to the choir.

What is this actually doing for the greater good?

The changing factor in my work is I got to go to Singapore in 2019 and spend the summer there with my family.

And I worked with some socially engaged artists there.

And like, there's this brilliant piece of work by Ernest Goh.

And we, he created this gorgeous dinner table.

And in the middle was sand and microplastics.

And you were invited to sit down at the dinner table and pick out microplastics that they had literally just gotten from the beach.

And I, and then I came back and being relatively new to St.

Louis, I just then kind of like put that together with the Mississippi because the Mississippi is a watershed for 40% of the United States.

I mean, it is wild the impact we have in St.

Louis to stop this.

And so the more research I did, I was like, if we could get this stuff off the streets, that means our streets are more attractive.

Our water is cleaner.

We're not sending it down to the Gulf of Mexico and out into the ocean.

So we've got a plastic bag art.

Yes.

So this is incredibly easy to make again, like very low threshold.

The thing that you want to really keep in mind is don't smell it.

If it smells, you're, you're emitting toxic fumes.

So you've got your plastic pieces that you laid down and we're, you know, we're not going for anything like super aesthetic.

We're just gluing stuff down right now.

This is the parchment again, crucial.

You just start ironing.

Yeah.

Like a little bit of pressure and then just kind of keep going around.

Yeah.

Now hold it up.

You can do this at home too.

Like literally anybody can do this.

It's awesome.

Yeah.

I want to really give credit to younger people and particularly children.

I think it was about 2020.

My daughter was in middle school and she was mad as a Hornet.

And she was learning about the ocean plastic from Team Seas.

And she looks at us and she says, you know, y'all have just created a climate disaster for the world.

And how am I supposed to trust any adult?

I was like, Oh my God.

Do what you can as you have time.

If you are stressed out and you've got to feed your family and you've got 10 minutes to do it and you need to pick up some food and it comes in a styrofoam container, that is not the time to yell at the restaurant or berate yourself for doing that.

That is the time to just eat and, and try to, you know, be a good human.

The time to do all that other stuff is as you've got the mental bandwidth.

And if that means you just slowly start collecting your plastic and make something awesome.

If that leads to something bigger, even better, but don't try to take it on all at once.

Just do what you can when you can without beating yourself up.

So what do you, what do you do with a plastic bag?

You watch this whole time?

Do you know?

It turns out the answer depends on who you ask.

A church group sees a sleeping mat.

A scientist sees a design challenge.

An artist sees a conversation starter and somewhere under my sink, a plastic bag sees about 200 of its closest friends.

Well, this is just like, I don't even plan to use this tape.

So whatever.

If I mess it up, I'll continue on.

Do you get paper bags ever?

You know, who feels like a plastic bag?

Sometimes it's Katy Perry.

Maybe we should just ask her.

Is it?