ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — So you care about the environment, and you take a reusable shopping bag with you to the grocery store to avoid polluting the planet with countless plastic sacks. Now you find out your bag is made with potentially harmful lead. What's an environmentalist to do?
If you're like Elnora Cooper, nothing.
"I'm not eating the bag … and I'm not going to get rid of it," Cooper, 68, said with a chuckle after walking out of a Wegmans Food Markets store in Rochester this week with a reusable bag under her arm.
The latest in a long line of ominous warnings about potentially dangerous products concerns synthetic but reusable bags that may contain traces of lead. The stir in supermarkets and Congress is less about whether the toxin might rub off on food and more about whether they could accumulate in landfills and create an environmental hazard.
But since the whole point of the bags is that they're to be kept, not tossed out, and because the concentration of lead in them is so low, some shoppers are convinced there's little risk of an imminent toxic catastrophe.
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