Quote:
Originally Posted by Platapus
Instead of banning them, would it not be a better long term strategy to encourage the reuse/recycling of plastic products?
Make it easy for people to recycle and they are more likely to do it
Give them some concrete, immediate benefit and they are more likely to do it.
I understand that probably the vast majority of the citizens simply don't care about recycling and if this is true, I can understand why banning them might seem the right solution.
I wonder how much it would cost to give the citizens $0.01 per bag recycled?
Would that be enough of an incentive to encourage someone who would normally not recycle to consider it?
Dunno
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I reuse plastic grocery bags all the time, so even though I have reusable bags for shopping I'll still take a few plastic bags every once in a while so I don't run out at home. If they charged a very small fee for them it would probably still be cheaper than buying, say, a box of Hefty bags for my small wastebaskets. I am going to be using and throwing out trash in some kind of plastic bag no matter where it comes from, might as well be one that's doing double duty. One bag for two jobs is still better than two bags for two jobs. If they charged a small fee for the bags and then gave me a little bit back for returning them to the store when I don't/can't use them, that would be even better.
And if charging for them meant that they actually made plastic grocery bags that weren't flimsy pieces of garbage to begin with I'd be even happier about it. That's my biggest gripe against them, is that I usually have two choices - use more than I need for the items I've bought in order to have functional bags that I can reuse, or take a reasonable (to me) number of bags and get home only to find that most of them are coming apart and can't be reused at all. Taking them back to a store I'm going to revisit anyway, even if they don't give me .01 cents per bag or whatever, would be preferable to throwing them in with the rest of my garbage after only one use.
We used to have small separate dumpsters for recyclable trash at my apartment complex, but they disappeared a couple of years back... I'm not sure why. Taking it to a facility myself is simply not feasible given the small amount of it I have and the distance involved, and I don't have space to keep bins where I could accumulate enough to make hauling it somewhere a win/win proposition.