Ban the Bags City Ordinance

The Ban the bags city ordinance

Here we go again another feel good ordinance that will have negligible impact on the global problem because it doesn’t attack the real cause. Instead the “environmentalists” are punishing everyone while allowing the tail to wag the dog.

Plastic is better than the alternatives. Since plastic is stronger than paper it takes less of it to carry your load. The Economist ran an article on plastic “Too much of a good thing” (3/3/18) that pointed out that you have to use a cotton tote bag 131 times before it has a lesser carbon footprint than plastic bags. And if you reuse just 40% of those plastic bags a second time (lining a trash bucket; picking up after your dog; etc.) the required usage rises to 173 times. That’s between two and a half to over three years of weekly trips to the market. And you have to frequently wash the cotton tote – it gets grungy and contaminated. Think Romaine lettuce.

Another inconvenient analysis by Dr. Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist at Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research in Lipzig, German pointed out that plastic in the ocean is a Prato Analysis on steroids! Instead of the usual 80% of the problem stemming from 20% of the causes, it turns out that between 88% and 95% of the plastic in the ocean is flushed down just 10 rivers– 8 are in Asia and 2 are in Africa, The U.S, ranks down at number 20 on the list of plastic polluters. “The U.S. and Europe are not mismanaging their collection waste.”

Even before “The Graduate”, plastic has been a ubiquitous part of our economy because it’s so useful. Since it’s not going away we need to engineer our waste management stream to handle it in all its forms not just reprocessing the shredder waste. If there were something better for insulating hot and cold products or protecting delicate electronics in transit than Styrofoam, we would be using it. The same is true for single use plastic bags. They’re so useful everyone uses them not just the super markets (although Costco provinces boxes). Even the newspaper gets delivered in a plastic sleeve on wet days.

When we come back from our weekly trip to the market all the plastic bags are stuffed into one (including the other ones we accumulate during the week) and they go back to the barrel in the market along with the soda bottles and cans the next week. This is where the “environmentalists” need to be focusing their attention, get everybody on board taking advantage of the existing waste management streams instead of agitating the merchants and the customers that make the community vibrant.

Just so the get their “green ticket” punched,