Red, Green & Blue: Is It Time for a Plastic Bag R.I.P.?
The city of New York is the latest government considering restrictions on plastic shopping bags, with a proposal in the works to require large stores to offer in-house recycling and reusable bags for sale. But is action like that enough to stop the plastic bag scourge?
From Africa to Canada, Australia to Ireland, and in the oceans in between, plastic bag trash has become a pestilence seemingly without end. And everyone has taken a different approach to try and curb it. In Burkina Faso, women who discovered the ubiquitous trash was killing their livestock have developed a cottage industry that spins plastic trash into hand-crocheted dolls. Ireland, on the other hand, has managed to reduce plastic bag use 90 percent by charging a tax on the totes, and some places in Australia ban the bags outright.
Even though I always carry along a reusable string tote, I’m guilty of letting baggers at the grocery pack my purchases in plastic when I’m in a hurry, or I’m buying too much to fit in a single bag. I’m sure others do the same. And the problem is convenience: it’s just easier to go with plastic sometimes and say you’ll recycle later.
So maybe it’s time to put an end to convenience. A measure like the one being eyed in New York City probably won’t do much to stop plastic bag use by hordes of shoppers who — like me — just want to get their stuff and go. But a tax or a ban? That would have an impact. The bottom line is: does anybody really ever need to use a plastic bag again? Why not end their use now?
Tags: plastic, plastic bag bans, plastic bag tax, plastic bags, recycling, Red, Green and Blue, trash
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October 30th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Good Afternoon Shirley!
I cannot believe you have attacked one of my most favorite innovations in the last 20 or so years. Plastic bags rock! I can carry twice the groceries in one pass using plastic than I can with paper… then the bags continue their life in varying uses such as luggage (yep… I’ve done many an overnighter in plastic instead of digging out a suitcase) then for scooping the cat litter. It’s a much too often underused device for dog-walkers to keep our lawns doggie-doo free as well. I’m a big fan of plastic bags… I think they are a wonderful innovation!
October 30th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
LOL!!! I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone wax that poetically about plastic bags.
I know, they’re good for all the things you mentioned above (my husband has also done the plastic-bag-as-luggage thing), but still: can’t we imagine life without them? Taxing or banning them wouldn’t place an undue burden on anyone, unlike other taxes or bans we’ve discussed in the past. And anyone who really, really wants to use plastic bags can buy a box of trash bags or zipper storage bags for their needs.
It seems like the world as a whole (especially the oceans — have you seen those images of the plastic vortex nightmare swirling in the Pacific?) would be better off without these things.
October 30th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
I don’t like to ban anything Shirley… I’ve got kind-of a knee-jerk abhorence to bans in general and particularly bans on something of such utility. I’d go for a little surcharge I guess but that would really be too expensive to administer I would think… particularly if you could get the deposit back like on a returnable Coke bottle.
I guess the question about the plastic in the ocean becomes; what happened to all the rest of the trash? Did it just sink off shore wherever it was dumped and only the plastic bags made it into the dead-sea vortex of plasti-skum? If that’s the case it would seem that the plastic on top would be the least of our worries… and certainly just the tip of the Garberg.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
It’s the plastic that floats and doesn’t decompose — that’s my understanding of why so much of it is swirling in the ocean.
Some scary facts from "Plastic Ocean," an article in Best Life Magazine:
The Pacific plastic vortex is twice the size of Texas;
Outside of what’s been incinerated, all the plastic ever manufactured is still around in one shape or another;
Only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are ever recycled;
One area of ocean tested contained six times as much microscopic plastic as it did plankton;
And, because of this, plastic is regularly entering the food chain … which means we’re eating it daily.
Read the article: it’s guaranteed you won’t ever feel as tempted to quote that "plastics" line from "The Graduate" again.
October 31st, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Don’t you think that the benefits out-weigh the costs in many cases though, Shirley.
Without plastic our food supply chain would fall apart. Its ability to preserve and insulate from harmful bacteria is certainly a benefit that cannot be ignored. Plastic containers are also very helpful in maintaining left-overs… a staple of basic conservation.
As for the bags; they are great for many uses… why not just encourage recycling and enjoy the benefits?
October 31st, 2007 at 3:35 pm
I’d encourage recycling if more people did it, but considering the millions upon millions of bags that enter the waste stream every year, not many do. I don’t think putting recycling bins in stores is going to have a major impact, either.
I know you don’t like outright bans, but what about a small tax on plastic shopping bags? It’s worked in Ireland — why not here?
October 31st, 2007 at 9:49 pm
With the exchange rate that tax works out to almost a quarter a bag. I guess you’ve got to weigh the cost against utility. I’m always for indexing the real lifecycle costs back to its product of origin (remember the oil tax proposal to index its cost to the real environmental and geopolitical costs). If the impact is a real $.25 per bag then I’d say it makes sense. That seems high to me though even including bureaucratic overhead so I would expect that the tax is infringing upon the utility.
It’s just like the price of gas or user fees at parks to me though. I say jack them through the roof so the roads and parks won’t be as crowded and will be more enjoyable for me
April 20th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
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