I have a dog. I know your pain. There is a such thing as biodegradable pooper bags, though.
A decent analogy might be those old pull tabs they had on aluminum cans years ago. You know the ones where you ended up with a little totally free pear shaped piece of aluminum in addition to your soda can with the newly created drinking hole?
Those things were no massive threat to either the environment or life and limb. And in theory everyone could put the damn things where they belonged. But, in practice the little frackers ended up everywhere, because, for a decent fraction of the people, even the extremely minor extra effort to do the right thing with them was just too damn much apparently.
So, eventually aluminum can technology advanced. Then the things were apparently banned in the USA?
Now, in theory, I guess we could have just expected folks to dispose of them in a responsible fashion and fined the folks that didnt. But do you really think that would work? Hell, litter is already illegal, and if I had a penny for every cigarette butt I’ve gotten within see distance “in the wild”…well…
Its not saving the environment, or anything else for that matter really, but is sure is nice to not have those damn little frackers everywhere you go these days.
Like An Gadai said, the 22c-per-bag levy really has worked over here. Practically overnight, the number of plastic bags blowing around the streets and caught in trees plummeted from a shitload to almost zero. It may be the single unequivocally good thing this crappy government has ever done.
It sounds counter-intuitive - who the heck would reuse a plastic bag just to save 22 cents? - but it works. People genuinely do bring plastic bags from home, or carry around cloth ones - even people who never did that before, even people who definitely aren’t short of 22 cents. I’d love to know the psychology behind it.
There’s a locally-owned grocery chain I shop at, where the mentality seems to be that using lots of grocery bags is just good customer service. If I don’t make any special requests then they’ll put the eggs in one double bag, bread in it’s own single bag, and the gallon of milk gets it’s own double bag even though I’m gonna carry it by the handle anyhow. If I tell the bagger not to put the ground beef in it’s own bag, I get “Are you sure? It’s meat.” I can buy 5 things and leave with 5 plastic bags. And I haven’t noticed that the Safeway/Albertson’s chains around here (Chicago) are much better. If you say something the baggers do follow your request, but otherwise they don’t waste time on trying to save bags.
So because of places like that I’m in favor of a fee/tax per bag. If people like Oredigger77 want to spend the 10 or 20 cents anyhow, hey, I think that’s fine. The goal is to cut down use overall, and most people will cut back. Some of the people willing to buy bags will still speak up when their gallon of milk goes into $0.20 of useless extra plastic.
I hope you guys get far enough down in the thread to read this, because I think I have something really valuable to say about this.
This ban is not about America. We don’t have the same problems in America with this that they have in other places, so of course we don’t see the need for it.
In Cameroon, like much of Africa, plastic bags are a major part of life. They are one of the few “unnecessary” items people can afford, so they kind of go nuts. Each and every purchase comes in one. When I’d step outside to buy an egg from the lady at the corner, she’d carefully put it in a plastic bag even though my house was just a few feet away. When I’d dutifully bring my re-usable bag to the market to buy food, they’d still carefully wrap each and every purchase in an individual bag, and then wrap the whole bundle in a second bag, and then put it in the bag I brought. When you buy lunch from cheap slop houses, it comes in bags, not on plates. You could even buy soda carefully decanted into plastic bags (bite off a corner and drink!) Once, I even ordered cookies at a restaurant and they came to my table on a plate, neatly wrapped in a plastic bag.
In the course of a normal day- breakfast, school, lunch, a trip to the market for food, maybe a visit to the bar in the evening- I’d get maybe 20 plastic bags. You’d end up with literally thousands of them over the week.
Now, of course they were re-used. But the quality of bag is far below the bags we get our veggies in. The “sturdiness” factor was more like plastic wrap. These bags would break after the first or second use.
And in Cameroon, there are no garbage dumps. There are no cans, no trucks, no landfill. Just a designated garbage pile in each neighborhood that gets burned a couple times a week.
The problem is, these bags don’t weigh much. So they float right off the garbage pile. And they end up everywhere. Our dirt roads were half black with ground-in bags. Our trees were draped in them. The edges of the road would be lined with a tide of them. You’d hike off to remote places miles away from human habitation- and a bag would float right by you. You’ve never seen anything like it.
It needs to stop. I hear Tanzania has a plastic bag ban, and that it has helped quite a bit.
In China, the system seems to work well. At the supermarket you have to specify that you want a bag and pay a very small fee (around one cent) per bag. Cloth bags are usually available for around twenty cents. Although I can easily afford the fee, I still usually remember to bring a cloth bag when I go shopping. It’s not a problem at all.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a plastic bag blowing around. I call bullshit on the idea that they are a problem unless cities like New York are still towing garbage out to sea. If that’s the case, the problem is with the dumping.
I find the bags very useful for yard trash. I hook one between the push bars on my lawnmower. They’re perfect for this.
The other idea that came to mind is a form fitting rain hat for UN folk.
Looks like someone needs Al Gore to jet over there with a box of carbon credits.
That’s funny, I’ve experienced the same thing and I’ve determined that it’s laziness. They can’t be bothered to learn how to bag properly, so they just use umpteen bags to the job that five or six bag could have done.
Your mind hasn’t truly boggled, however, until you’ve brought plenty of reusable bags with your and the bagger is so incapable of packing groceries, he fills the reusable bags only partway and continues bagging your groceries into plastic bags. :smack::smack::smack::smack:
Is it rude to insist on bagging your own groceries? I find myself doing that a lot these days.
even sven when the U.N. calls for a worldwide ban it is about America as well as other countries.
The motivation for saving 22 cents has puzzled me, too.
But I suspect your first sentence is part of the answer :- give those idiots in government a cent I don’t have too ?
(BTW, I’d have to list the smoking ban as an unequivocally good thing, too, and I speak as someone who smoked when it was introduced).
Holy crap. I am pretty anti-litter and my blood pressure went up just reading this.
If I was in the middle of beautiful nowhere and garbage bags were blowing past me, I end up going all hulk like. And unfortunately for anybody in the vicinity, I dont run around wearing stretchable pants or underwear.
I object to putting dog poop in them. The poop will fade into the ecology, the bag will be around for centuries.
I put my cat poop in old bread bags. Empty the bread and save the bag for kitties toxic waste.
Weed smokers use plastic zip bags. I hope they reuse them.
"The environment ministry estimated that about 1.2 billion free plastic bags were being handed out every year in the [Irish] republic, leaving windblown bags littering Irish streets and the countryside. " from BBC News
I dont like the idea of using force to stop stores from offering (for free if they so desire) plastic bags to their customers. Seems like an overboard reaction to me.
“Their is a problem with to many plastic bags”
“Okay lets use force to fix this problem”
Am I the only person who has an issue with everyone jumping straight to the idea that the government must solve all problems like this? I am fine with private companies doing as they will, but I dont think the government should get involved.
I might just be woefully out of touch. I’m in northern Idaho, I don’t see plastic bags going rogue all over the place - someone’s always using them. Litter pisses me off, like it’s that damned hard to find a garbage can.
I never even see litter unless I drive to Washington which blows me away because the jack-booted Washington cops hand out MASSIVE fines for littering - I know this because they have signs about litter and seat belts every 1/4mile. Is it really worth $87 to huck your big gulp out the window at 70mph?
I see cap and trade proposals and plastic bag taxes as overly punitive. I’m a good, responsible citizen. I don’t litter. I treat my environment with respect, so do my neighbors, our neck of the woods is clean and beautiful. I don’t want to suffer economically for something I haven’t done and won’t do.
Cap and trade won’t lower emissions, it will lower the GDP of the US; I don’t find that prospect appealing or particularly useful to the environment. The green movement is plagued by propaganda and unrealistic expectations. Wind and wave power? Really? Hydroelectric power is viable, that’s how we get our power here in the NW. Nuclear power is clean and cheap, any reason we’re not using more of it? Why does the green movement persist in nitpicking individuals and pursuing moronic solutions instead of implementing existing industry controls and expanding the viable solutions we already employ?
My reusables hold more than a standard brown paper grocery bag - and way more than the plastic ones.
We got along fine just ten years ago with far fewer plastic bags. Somehow, we managed to pick up dogshit and take out the bathroom trash can back then. They are useful for some things - outright banning them would be bad. But they should not be the default alternative.
The first problem is the fines arent big enough.
The second problem is its really not practical to enforce it, and even when they can they most likely DONT.
Word. There was no such thing as plastic bags at the grocery store back when I was a kid. Small brown paper bags for produce, large bags for groceries. They’ve become commonplace and convenient, but they’re not necessary to our functional lives.
I often wonder about collecting my trash in plastic garbage bags. Does the plastic prevent the contents from degrading in the landfill? Or am I right in assuming that the mastication by the garbage truck breaks them open and allows the contents to spill, then degrade?
You’ve sited nothing in the way of proof. It was a bullshit claim linked to a factoid (1.2 billion bags). As I said before, I can’t remember the last time I saw a loose plastic bag floating around. If we were talking about the old pull tabs on aluminum cans then yes, they were everywhere. If cities are dumping trash in the ocean, then that is a problem. These bags are vastly superior to paper bags, cleaner to use than cloth sacks, take up less landfill and are recycleable.
This in UN noncense. The article you posted talked about taxes to curb their use which is just another sheeple tax on the stupid. Create a crisis and then tax it.