What difference does it make if it’s biodegradable?
I hate the idiotic bag tax plague that is spreading in the DC area right now. However, I got 5 bags for the price of three at a Target in Montgomery County this evening, so there is that. Also, there seems to be a market opportunity for people to sell 4 cent bags in front of every shop.
The fee is ostensibly part of an anti-littering initiative. The cynical part of me thinks that everyone should start “setting free” their 5 cent bags after using them. When they cover the surface of every lawn and parking lot, and every roof and riverbank, even to a depth of 3 inches, maybe then will the dumbass legislators reconsider this matter.
Yes, either that or you don’t take the bag. I’m actually waiting for them to start charging us 5 cents for the bag the free newspaper comes in that I don’t want in the first damn place.
Just wait until fucking O’Malley figures out that they make money off a bag tax and it’ll spread around Maryland. The same thing happened with the speed cameras, they started off in Montgomery county then they moved state wide.
Actually that’s a good point. Are the throwers of this trash chared 5 cents per bag?
I know anecdote is not the plural of data, but I use mine well more than 171 times as I use mine every week day (except on the very rare occasions when I forget it) which would be over 200 times in just a year and I’ve had it for longer than three years. Plus, when I bought it, I got a deal for 5 (or maybe 6) for less than $20, so I figure I’m probably good for most of the rest of my life 
.
As for staining and chicken juice, I wash mine every week with the other laundry.
Does that math account for differing number of bags of each type you use?
Because let’s face it, most people can and do put a lot more stuff in a reusable bag than they would in one of those plastic bags. On a big stock-up trip, I might use 5 of our reusable bags, but an equivalent trip would get me probably 20 little plastic bags. If a reusable bag is equivalent in use to 4 plastic ones, you would in fact have to use it less than 45 times to hit the break-even point. Even if you reuse all your plastic grocery bags for stuff (given the buildup just from when we forget our bags, I cannot imagine anybody does that), you’d be at 90 uses. Given the reuse:throwing away ratio I’ve generally seen for the plastic bags, I’d guess more in the range of 50-60 uses. Which means you’d need to keep it a year or so, and I don’t know anybody who gets rid of a cotton bag anything like that early. Some of the recycled plastic ones are looking kind of rough at the end of a year of heavy use, but the cotton ones usually still look like new.
So for most people, yeah, cotton is going to be a lot better than plastic.
I’m glad there is a bag tax in DC. Maybe litter isn’t a nuisance where other people live, but in my neighborhood, people just don’t use trash cans. A couple years ago, plastic bags would be picked up by the wind and get deposited in my yard on a near-daily basis. It was friggin’ annoying to have to go out and pick up plastic bag litter from my bushes and driveway every couple of days. Don’t even get me started on the stupid bags getting caught up in trees.
Today, a few years into the bag tax, I would say the plastic bag litter in my yard has been cut by 85%. There’s still empty soda and beer bottles on the street and sidewalk, yes, but those don’t fly all over the goddamned place.
Perhaps people like ataraxy22 who wish to see people litter more in response to a bag tax are simply intelligence-impaired, but here’s my response: go pound sand. Here in DC, the bag tax has dramatically cut down on one type of litter, it has raised money to clean up the Anacostia River, it has prevented literally tons of garbage from polluting estuaries and other habitats, and overall it has been a great success.
Really? We have a plastic bag in the broom closet which we fill with other plastic bags. Most of the year it looks like we have the same amount so we must use them at a fairly constant rate. We’ve been known to run out at the holidays though.
I don’t know anyone that doesn’t save bags. Lots of people have the tube made out of a hand towel, you stuff bags in the top and fish them out the bottom. I request paper bags now and then just to make sure we have some for basting turkey or shucking corn.
I would really miss having a steady supply of bags.
That’s interesting. Colorado has a very small littering problem. There is up to a $1000 fine for so much as tossing a cig out your window. This is the only reason I would like to be a police officer. I would enforce that law for sure.
Well, as a percentage it works out great. But realistically if you’re making 6 cents profit on each and the bags cost 2 cents each - even though that’s tripling your money every time - you’d still have to sell at least 1000 per hour to make it worthwhile. They get really heavy in those numbers, and I doubt the stores in question pull that many customers.
Sometimes I’ll root through the “Plastic Bag Recycling” bin at the front of the store and pull some free bags out if I don’t have mine, but apparently I’m not the only who’s had that idea as there are almost never any decent usable bags in there since the tax went into effect.
Even though DC has improved quite a bit in the last 20 years, I’d still rather have cops busy catching murderers, rapists and thieves than upping the litter patrol. There are many ways to skin a cat; for one part of the litter problem, a bag tax is a much better public policy than directing police to hand out more littering tickets.
It’s also cost effective, as you’re basically commandeering store employees to collect the revenue that the cops used to be in charge of collecting. . . :mad:
Yeah, people save bags…up to a point. Supply tends to massively outstrip demand for most people I know, so after a while they build up to unmanageable proportions and people either start putting them in the recycling bin or just tossing them in the trash. Like I said, baggers barely put anything in the plastic bags, so even for a small midweek trip to the grocery, we’re looking at 2-3 bags. For a full weekly shop, probably 8-10 bags. For a monthly stock up trip, around 20. Most of us only have so many bathrooms and litter boxes, ya know?
Oh my god, I never thought of the human toll on the poor checkout clerks!
Police would have to actually see someone in the act of littering, stop their patrol, approach the subject, ask for ID, write a ticket, then make sure that ticket is properly recorded in the city’s records for such things; then the court system would have to follow up on whether the litterer paid the ticket, and the city would have to determine what to do if someone had multiple unpaid citations outstanding for long periods of time; and so on and so on. Easy peasy!
Those poor supermarket clerks have to hit a button three times to indicate that someone is buying three plastic bags… then actually collect 15 cents from the customer! How inefficient is THAT?!?!
You have given me some serious food for thought, in which the old system of using the valuable time of cops, courts, and city officials to ineffectively tackle the nuisance of litter may in fact be preferable to a quick, easy, and innovative solution to the same problem.
This is nothing compared to the bag fucking tax.
They collect that at closing time, right?
Or the hag fucking tax. I mean, it’s a 1:50am hookup, she smells like stale cigarettes and cheap whiskey, and I’m going to be taxed on that? WTF!?!
Well, these taxes are designed to discourage the behaviors in question.
Why does anyone use cotton shopping bags? Wegmans has reusable bags in the impulse displays in the checkout lanes, made out of recycled plastic (including, apparently, shopping bags). They’re a hell of a lot tougher than cotton, and cheaper, and they keep used bags from getting landfilled.