California on verge of banning plastic bags

[mookiemookie]

California is poised to become the first state in the nation to ban plastic shopping bags, a move hailed by environmentalists and grocers alike.

The state Senate approved the ban on Friday, sending it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office for his signature.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37514616...s-environment/

I'm not sure about this. I re-use plastic bags from the store often and I wouldn't like if they got rid of them. I think they have it backwards here. They should give out the paper bags for free, but charge you extra if you wanted plastic.

Sounds pretty inconvenient. But reading the stories about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and you kind of understand where they're coming from.

[Weiss Pinguin]

Yeah, I can understand why they would do it, but my family, for one, reuses plastic bags a LOT. There's just some things you can't do with a paper bag... But I suppose if Texas banned plastic bags we'd work around it and move on.

[AVGWarhawk]

I reuse our plastic bags. I understand the city of Baltimore wants to charge a tax for each bag used by a customer.

[STEED]

I believe Ireland has banned them.

Many of our stores here are charging 10p per plastic bag or have banned them. There are still some stores where there still free, I do agree we must re-use them as munch as possible. After all, make sense to cut down in waste.

[Ducimus]

Personally, im not sure what to think of it. Guess it'll just take me longer to carry the grocceries in using paper bags, which i don't mind unless they start charging for them.

[NeonSamurai]

I would rather they went after those stupid plastic water bottles.

[August]

Originally Posted by NeonSamurai

I would rather they went after those stupid plastic water bottles.

I would bet they are on the radar already.

[Ducimus]

Wouldn't doubt it. When it comes to environmental stuff, CA can get pretty nazi about it. As plastic bags go, i'll nod my head and say, ok you got a point. That point being the pacific garbage patch. Kinda hard to argue when faced with that. I have to admit, having done some deep sea fishing in the past, it does pain me a bit knowing its out there. However, that is not *all* our doing. Japan, Korea and China are massive contributers to it as well.

Sometimes i think Enviormental protection acts are pointless because not everyone plays by the same rules. I know for a fact that in some areas of the world, there is no EPA like agency, and you can pretty much do what you want.

[SteamWake]

I encourage my wife to use those reusable cloth sacks. She tends to bring home less that way

[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

I believe Ireland has banned them.

No they just charge for them so most people now have re-usable bags.
The only place you will still get free plastic bags is at a butchers

[frau kaleun]

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

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.

[August]

Charging for plastic bags is not going to address the litter problem which is what this is all about. Now a deposit system like that on cans and bottles might but i'd bet it would cost a lot more to administer than an outright ban.

Litterbugs suck.

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by August

Charging for plastic bags is not going to address the litter problem which is what this is all about. Now a deposit system like that on cans and bottles might but i'd bet it would cost a lot more to administer than an outright ban.

Yeah, that's the downside to implementing a plan to return a bag and get your deposit back. You couldn't just have a bin where people drop them off. And I don't think most people would stand in line at a customer service counter to get a few cents for something they can just toss out without any hassle. Most people wouldn't even bother bringing them back to toss them in the store's recycling bin.

I also wish they'd do a better job of training cashiers and baggers how to bag stuff in the first place, I try to go through lanes where I do my own bagging otherwise I buy a handbasket's worth of groceries and end up carrying out six bags with two items in each one. Of course if the bags weren't so flimsy to begin with the baggers might be willing to risk using fewer of them.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

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.

That's exactly what we do in our house. I use the plastic bags for my lunches.