California on verge of banning plastic bags

[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.

[August]

Y'know if shopping bags were made biodegradable this would avoid the whole issue. We need something that degrades like paper, is as strong and light as plastic and is just as cheap to produce.

[Subnuts]

I'm more concerned about paper grocery bags. My front end manager told me last year that a single paper bag costs as much as four plastic bags, and I almost never see anyone reusing them. Besides that, I constantly see customers using a double paper bag for two rolls of paper towels, and kleptomaniacal seniors sneaking away with 15 or 20 bags when no one is looking. Apparently, our store spent $1 million on grocery bags in 2007, which comes to about $2,500 for every employee. OTOH, we offer canvas bags for $0.99, which can hold 30 pounds of groceries easily, and deduct five cents from the bill for every bag the customer uses.

Even if one ignores the environmental issues of paper and plastic bags, a gradual shift towards reusable bags might make sense economically.

[Tchocky]

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.

Litterbugs suck.

Speaking from what's happened in Ireland, we introduced a levy on bags and the littering dropped massively. I think usage dropped by something like 98% after the introduction.

[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.

[Turbografx]

I wish people would just bring their own re-usable heavy-duty bags to the super-market with them. Everyone did this when I lived in the Netherlands and it wasn't a big deal. Nice not to see all those trashy bags everywhere. You can still get them but they cost like .25 cents so everyone just brings their own grocery bag.

[d@rk51d3]

Plastic bags (thin type grocery bags) have been banned here in South Australia for at least 12 months. Shopping centres stock the "cloth" bags that you can buy for $1, if you forget your own.

Drawback is that now we need to actually purchase bin liners.

Strangely, the heavy duty plastic bags you get from department stores aren't banned.

Biodegradeable bags seem to be knackered before you even get to use them.