MILLBROOK HEIGHTS — Local man Dennis Hollowell, 44, told at least eleven people Tuesday that he had brought his own bag to the Fairway Valu-Mart on Route 9, a statement that witnesses described as “loud,” “unprompted,” and “delivered to the cart corral.”

The bag, a canvas tote reading “Ask Me About Composting,” was not present for any of the announcements. According to sources, it spent the entire trip folded in the trunk of Hollowell’s sedan, behind a case of seltzer and a bicycle pump he has not used since 2019.

“I just always bring my own,” Hollowell told a cashier, who had not asked and was in the middle of scanning a rotisserie chicken. He then repeated the statement to the bagger, a woman in line behind him, and a stock clerk who had been walking past with a pallet of paper towels and who later described the encounter as “a lot.”

At press time, Hollowell had carried eleven loose items to his car in his arms, explaining to the parking lot that this was “what happens when you do the right thing.”

Store employees confirmed that Hollowell declined a paper bag, declined a plastic bag, and then asked, with visible concern, whether anyone had noticed he had declined both. The Valu-Mart does not offer plastic bags, a policy in place since 2021.

“What we’re seeing is a textbook case of announcement-forward sustainability,” said Dr. Marguerite Ostrander-Pell, associate fellow in Checkout Lane Ethics at the Institute for Applied Smugness in Dayton. “The bag is no longer a container. It’s a press release. And like most press releases, it works best when nobody checks whether the product exists.”

Ostrander-Pell noted that Hollowell’s behavior fits a broader pattern in which the environmental benefit of a tote bag is estimated to be 4 percent carrying groceries and 96 percent being mentioned. She added that a bag must be reused 131 times to offset its production, and that Hollowell’s tote has been reused zero times and mentioned roughly 900.

“I just always bring my own.”

Hollowell’s wife, Janine, said she was not surprised. “He did this at the pharmacy last week,” she said. “He didn’t buy anything. He just came in to say it.”

The tote itself, reached for comment in the trunk, said nothing, which sources close to the bag described as “consistent.” It is believed to be one of fourteen similar totes in the Hollowell household, none of which has ever been present at the moment of announcement.

Hollowell remained defiant when asked whether the bag might be more effective if it left the trunk. “That’s not the point,” he said. “The point is that I have it.”

At publication, he was reportedly planning a return trip to the Valu-Mart to mention to the stock clerk that he had since remembered to bring the bag inside, and would the clerk like to see it.