OTTAWA — Jessica Abbott is a college student, works full time and doesn’t have a car. She orders groceries through Instacart to her London, Ont., home from Walmart, Real Canadian Superstore and No Frills, receiving four to 10 reusable bags every fortnight. Until recently, she had four drawers full of neatly-folded bags, but she now donates them to a food bank.

Still, she wished supermarkets would take her bags back and reuse them. “It’s putting so much more weight and pressure on the consumer to make these better choices rather than the multibillion-dollar corporations,” she said.

After Canada’s ban on single-use plastics took effect last December, online-grocery customers like Abbott are finding themselves stuck with piles of reusable bags that they can’t return. Here’s a look the country’s three largest grocers’ different approaches:

• Loblaw: Eliminated single-use checkout bags this year. Its online delivery service now comes in reusable totes that customers cannot return. An FAQ on the Real Canadian Superstore website tells customers to “keep an eye out for future green delivery options,” but does not elaborate on what those options will be. Loblaw didn’t respond to The Logic’s request for comment.
• Sobeys: Eliminated single-use plastic bags from all its stores in 2019, public affairs lead Sarah Dawson said via email. This year, its home-delivery service Voila is switching from using plastic to paper bags, which cannot be returned. Dawson didn’t respond to questions on whether Sobeys plans to provide reusable alternatives.
• Metro: Offered bagless online deliveries since 2021 and made it the default option this year, said director of e-commerce operations Ryan Gilling. Groceries are delivered in recycled cardboard boxes or plastic bins to transfer into their own reusable bags.
  Although the transfer process takes an extra 50 seconds per order, going bagless has increased picking efficiency and order accuracy, said Gilling. “If you’re looking for the most environmentally friendly, the cheapest option and the easiest option to implement, bagless is the unicorn here.”

The impact: Delivering groceries in new reusable totes or paper bags every time defeats the purpose of banning single-use plastics, said Lilly Woodbury, plastics campaigner for B.C.-based environmental group Surfrider Foundation Canada.

“This stuff is gnarly,” she said. “It’s also going to take a lot of energy and water … to be recycling all these reusable bags. Ideally, the reusable bags stay in circulation.”

The solutions: The key to creating a closed-loop grocery delivery system is to require grocers to reuse bags and boxes and incentivize consumers to return them, environmental groups say.

New Jersey tabled a bill last October that would require grocers and grocery delivery services to establish a program to return, clean and reuse or recycle reusable bags and suggests providing an unpackaged delivery option. 

But the return rate could be low without a deposit system, said Karen Wirsig, senior program manager at Toronto-based non-profit Environmental Defence. For example, Ontario’s Beer Store has a 97 per cent recovery rate for containers in exchange for deposit refunds. Grocers could implement a similar system of standardized plastic bins with wash off labels, said Wirsig.

For now, customers like Abbott are left holding the bag. “If you make it easier for consumers to make good choices, they will,” she said. “[Stores] have a responsibility to make those good choices accessible, easy and well known.”