Shaw is straight up wrong about this. Plastic bag bans and taxes shouldn't even be permitted by government. Concerned about the environment? Stop using them. Don't get the 800 pound bully involved.
If you’re used to grabbing your purchases at the store by the handles of a plastic shopping bag and you live in Connecticut, get ready for a change. If all goes as planned, by sometime this fall you will probably either be figuring out a different way to cart your groceries home or you’ll be paying a bit more. Taking after the schemes enacted in California and other locations, the state is preparing to save the environment by taxing the use of plastic bags.
I’m not here to defend the premise that plastic grocery bags are a great idea. We haven’t used them in years in our house. We have a set of those cloth bags with handles which you can keep using for a very long time. We make an exception every month or two and ask for paper bags because I use those for packing up the paper recycling, but otherwise it’s all cloth for us.
But what Connecticut is doing is yet another exercise in the government pretending they can modify human behavior through tax policy and it stinks. They know full well that the average family that gets four or five bags of groceries per week is probably going to just pony up the extra quarter on shopping day rather than be bothered with all this nonsense. And Connecticut’s elected officials are pretty much admitting that, saying that it will be a “steady revenue stream.”
Why not stop being hypocrites? If you truly think that plastic bags are an evil which should be removed from civilized realms (and there’s definitely an argument for that idea) then just ban them rather than cashing in on the game. Several states and cities have already done it. The National Conference of State Legislatures provides a list of places where various bag restrictions are either already in place or being considered. California and Hawaii have pretty much banned them entirely, along with several large cities including Chicago and Seattle. Allowing the use of the evil bags to continue flourishing while the government pockets tens of millions of dollars per year (by their own estimates) is simply hypocrisy.
But even if I’m not a fan of plastic bags, is banning them at all really the answer? Even assuming you want the government micromanaging your life and the free market that much, possibly not. This think piece at Wired from last year poses the question of what you’ll be replacing them with after the ban.
I prefer plastic bags. They are lightweight, strong and physically take up very little room at home. They have the advantage of allowing shifing bulk in way paper bags can never do.They are dual use items for hauling groceries and as trash bags, as well as general packaging items. The grocery store I use offers paper bags at the manned checkout stands, and plastic bags at the automated checkout, the second of which I use all the time. And when those checkouts are closed, I do have the option of requesting plastic bags.
| Those who use and advocate reusable grocery bags had better also be advocating that the things be washed after every use. Studies have demonstrated that reusable bags are a breeding ground for all sorts of undesirable bacteria, and thus are a health risk for the households using them unless chemicals, energy, and water are spent to keep them sanitary. When those costs are added to the cost of manufacturing the things, I suspect the net impact to the environment compared to plastic bags, reused in all sorts of ways, will be the same or considerably worse. |
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