Plastic Bag Manufacturers – A Poor Investment
San Francisco, always on the leading edge of environmental actions, this week banned the use of plastic bags by chain pharmacies. Six months ago they banned the bags from supermarkets, and the ban seems to be spreading to other cities as well. Cities that have banned or are considering banning bags include Boston, Baltimore, Arlington (TX), New Haven and Westport (CT), Portland (OR), as well as Paris and London. On June 1st China will prohibit stores from handing out free plastic bags.
Americans throw away over 100 billion plastic bags every year, with only a small percentage making it to landfills, the rest festooning trees, bushes, cacti, and power lines. In Ireland, they once refered to plastic bags as their national flag, South Africans as their national flower. Both passed laws, or prohibited the free distribution of plastic bags, and have reduced their bag use by more than 90%. San Francisco’s garbage collection company reports that there are 10% – 15% fewer bags showing up at their recycling facility since the ban at supermarkets. Most recycling facilities cannot recycle soft plastic bags.
And of course there are critics of the bag ban.
Plastic bag manufacturers sued the city of Oakland when they passed a bag ban because an environmental impact report was not conducted. Like one was needed. The California Grocers Association says that San Francisco city officials should instead educate people to use recyclable or reusable bags, such as cloth. Which, of course, is a good point. Except that people won’t do it.
The plastic bag problem is not only one of filling up landfills, clogging up recycling machines, and appearing as the most common item of trash in the world, but their elimination would save countless barrels of oil. And the whole problem would go away if each of us would simply change our old habits. Little things we can do include carrying in plastic bags that we have into stores and reusing them, not accepting a plastic bag for one item purchases that we can carry, and using cloth bags.
I do have to admit that it took some effort on the part of my wife to get me to carry cloth bags whenever I shopped. Old man stubbornness, addiction to convenience (it was easy to just accept a plastic bag at checkout), and just plain laziness had to be overcome. But it didn’t take long before the habit took hold, and now I just automatically grab a cloth bag or bags out of the car where they live.
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You have missed an important point – these bags make great garbage can bags and bags for camping gear. If not for grocery bags, we’d just have to buy plastic bags for these purposes.
Even more important, our government does not have the right to tell citizens how to live their lifes. We need to not tolerate this creeping authoritarianism of governments at all levels in our daily lives.
If you wish to take your own bag, that fine by me, but don’t try to have the government tell me what I should do!
We have purchased our own cloth shopping bags and find it quite convenient to use. We keep them in the car and just grab them when we go into shop. We discovered on our last trip to a Safeway store that they give a 3 cent credit per bag for using our own bags. Its sad to see the scattered plastic bags adorning trees, fences and whatever that dot the landscape of our beautiful country….
Frank – And you have missed a very important point. The average person accumulates many more plastic bags then they can possibly use to hold their garbage. Where do the rest go? You know exactly where they go. And I suppose the government not telling you–and the rest of the population–what to do is going to prevent these plastic bags from showing up everywhere, even in the bellies of fish, birds, and mammals.
“Even more important”–if you don’t like the government telling us what to do to protect us and the world from ourselves, then you can change that, exercise your vote. If there are enough others around who think as you do, your wishes will prevail. Remember, that you are the government. It is you that put the politicians in place to run this country. And if you think the government should not tell you what to do, we would still have slavery, women that couldn’t vote, acid rain, dioxin, DDT–need I go on?
Wow ! Here we go again w/ Govt. getting into grocery store plastic bags!
Our polititions worry more about light bulbs, baseball players & now bags ?
What about our boarders, price of gas, taxes , etc. ???
If you put one of these grocery bags out in the sun, after awhile they decompose to powder. Try it !
Americans just need to respect our land. These bags are NOT the only thing found along the roads & rivers. Pick up & dispose trash properly !
Canvas/cloth bags have their problems too. One needs to wash them often; as stuff ( meats ) leak . Sickness ?
Good news is most Rvers & Rv parks keep America clean, recycle & properly dispose trash.
Most leave their camp site cleaner than they found it. Keep setting a good example. TXbc
What does this have to do with RV camping and the open road. If I wanted to read about plastic bags and how government is controlling my life I would go to a different site. Keep the Blogs relevant to the subject matter!!!!
Ron – You can’t divorce RV camping and the open road from everyday events and actions that affect us RVers. The difference between us and the house-bound doesn’t place us in a bubble that protects us from government, trash, air quality, global warming, loss of wildlife habitat, protection of endangered species–or plastic bags.
I think the article does pertain to RV camping. After all it’s our outdoors that is being trashed with the bags. Much good has come from government regulation , clean water ,safer cars, the 40 hour week ,etc. People fight change ,even change that is better for everyone. Some times the only way to bring it about is by making it a law.
As full timers we use all of our grocery store plastic bags for trash. I’ve been wondering if they do degrade faster than heavy black trash bags. It seems that being as they are so thin they have to use less plastic to produce and should be better environmentally than actual trash bags. So as much as I’d like to see them gone , I’d miss them for trash use.
Karen – One other problem with the plastic supermarket bags is that they are so thin that they clog the machines that separate recyclables, and are therefore not recyclable. Also, they take many, many years to breakdown. Though not quite into the mainstream market yet, bioplastic bags are making their appearance. Made from vegetable matter, they degrade quickly. They are still a bit more expensive than the other plastic bags, but as more restraints are placed on their use, the more likely it is that bioplastic bags will start popping up, especially at the more environmentally responsible stores.
Do away with plastic bags, then what do I do when I take my dog for a walk around the campground? I’m not buying cloth bags to be used once for the doggie mess. Of course, without plastic bags you may want to watch where you walk around the campground.
Then again, I guess we could pass laws to keep all pets out of our parks.
…and what about all those people that are using more than one sheet of toilet paper?
Bill – It would, indeed, be nearly impossible to do away with all plastic bags, for just the uses you describe. The difference is that used as doggie mess bags they will–hopefully–go into the trash and ultimately into the landfill, and not find their way onto trees, vacant lots, power lines, and the stomachs of wildlife. It is not so much the plastic bag itself, as it is the incredible quantity of bags produced and the number of them that end of as trash. The ultimate answer is for supermarkets, drug stores, etc. to offer alternatives such as cloth bags as well as bags that are bioplastic, made from vegetable matter that will decompose in landfills and other places where they end up. And if the quantity of regular plastic bags that are manufactured goes down, oil consumption and CO2 emissions go down as well, and that’s good for both the environment and the litter problem.