Hate Plastic Bags? Or Hate the Thought of Banning Plastic Bags? Take a Survey!
Decatur Metro | January 25, 2011When I first caught wind of a potential initiative to ban or tax plastic bags by Decatur’s Environmental Sustainability Board back in October, the post produced 87 comments of a heated back-and-forth about everything from the dangers of plastic bags to the dangers of banning plastic bags.
Well, now the Board is openly appealing to the Decatur population at-large to take a 5-question survey to get a better gauge of support for legislation that would either ban, tax or limit the use of plastic bags and Styrofoam by retailers.
Why plastic bags and Styrofoam? Here’s the Board’s argument…
Estimates are that in the U.S. 60,000 plastic bags are used every 5 seconds. Less than 10% of these are recycled.
Polystyrene foam adds to the waste stream and presents a hazard for birds and other wildlife as it breaks up into indigestible pellets. The market now provides products that serve the same commercial purpose, are readily available and are less harmful for the environment.
How will/did you respond?
Washington D.C.’s $.05 tax per plastic bag seems to have worked pretty well for cutting usage, from 22.5 million bags a month on average to 3 million: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/29/AR2010032903336.html?sub=AR . I’d favor the tax over an outright ban.
I agree with TOK. Behavior modification will get people to bring there own, but make them available when you don’t have any other options. Decatur though, such a small area…really needs to include a larger area to make much of an impact.
If the only choice is tax or ban, then ban them. A tax has nothing to do with protecting the environment as far as the government is concerned. It’s simply another money grab and once a tax is implemented a government no longer has a reason to discourage use, on the contrary, heavier usage means more money and power. This is right up there with those who want to tax soda for the health benefits of all! It’s not a tax to protect, it’s a money grab from those they believe have deep pockets.
A ban is, at the very least, a lot more honest.
Some stores give you a small discount if you bring in your own reusable bags.
Incentive, rather than punishment.
I don’t want plastic bags to go away entirely. What else am I going to put the cat turds in?
There are better ways to take care of the animal refuse. Use Dog Waste BioBags. Why put biodegradable waste in a plastic bag that will last for over 100 years? Check out the following website for BioBags – http://www.eco-homestore.com. 50 bags for $5.39.
Keith is right. A tax will have no actual impact on usage. Consider tobacco, alcohol, etc. The claim that the tax is meant to deter usage is really just a lie.
And don’t even touch on the soda tax. Has to be one of the most ludicrous ideas I’ve heard in a while. They subsidize soda to make it cheap, then want to add a tax to it? Literally makes no sense to me at all….
Soda subsidies?? Really????? Explain!
The sweetner is subidized — high fructose corn syrup.
I’m not sure about soda being subsidized to make it cheap. My understanding is it’s actually the sugar subsidy program that made soda so expensive to produce that it lead directly to another percieved evil…the use of HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup). Because the sugar growers are so protected they keep the prices artificially high. Now all of a sudden the health crazies believe sugar is more healthy than HFCS so Coke and Pepsi and others have started releasing sugar based sodas because they’re now, quite amazingly, seen as a healthier alternative to fructose. They’re also more expensive to make becasue of the artificially high sugar prices so price increases can’t be far behind.
Actually tobacco taxes can have HUGE impacts on tobacco usage, but not in positive ways. If taxes raise enough the sales will shift from legal channels to illegal ones. Usage doesn’t really go down but various crimes begin to pay bigger financial dividends.
Encouragement works better than punishment.
Actually, I believe that evidence-based research about behavior change shows the opposite. Environmental interventions that do not require any human decision-making, e.g. speed bumps, change behavior more than negative consequences, which work better than many positive consequences, mostly because the latter are often in the future. The exception to the rule is anything that has to do with social status, e.g. fashion, prestige–people do amazing things to gain in social status.
That doesn’t mean that punishment is the best choice–efficacy is just one part of a policy decision. But I wouldn’t say that encouragement works better in the area of population behavior change.
I say we ban them, but only on Sundays.
+1
This is just odd, especially since I can think of just one big user of plastic bags in the city.
It ‘s another regulatory/accounting hassle and it won’t really have a significant impact on the environment.
Yes, it’ll give the environmental sustainability board a little checkbox on their to-do list (Yippee! Hooray for us!), but I’d guess it would have a minute fraction of the impact of getting one more car off the road with transporation/ walkability projects, planting more trees or improving the efficiency of city HVAC systems, just for a few quick examples. (No, I’m no rocket-brain engineer surgeon, so I hope someone responds with an obscure academic study from Finland, or another glowing example of how San Franciso is heaven manifest on earth.)
Every problem doesn’t require a government solution.
Haven’t you heard? San Fran’s out, Portland’s in!
the dream of the 90s
LOVED the Chicken skit (Colin!)
I say we ban the board.
or tax them for every recommendation
Just ban all bags. All of them have to be manufactired, so they all have an environmental impact. Plus, as we know, too many people overeat. This is the fault of shopping bags. If we were forced to live on what we could carry out of a market with our own two hands (or stuff into our shirts), we’d combat overeating and provide an even greater environmental benefit to boot.
I’m totally going on the “All You Can Carry” diet!
Plus we would be through stage one of pledging at Delta Tau Chi
I’m not going to sit here and listen to the Sustainability Board bad mouth the United States of America!
LOL! Well played, DEM.
During prohibition, a ban on alcohol was a boon for soda. What era would a ban on plastic bags and Styrofoam usher in?
Prohibition was also a boon for Italian food–the restaurants mostly made their own wine…
But where was I going with this? Uhmm, pasta.
It may be unpopular, but I’ll say it. I’m growing tired of the reusable bags. I only need a handful, but it seems that every realtor, bank, neighborhood association even the city has a bad and hands it out. I have to believe that in terms of the environment and karma the energy and labor to make these reusable bags is quickly becoming a nuisance as well.
Tip: You may check more than one box in answer to the survey questions.
Why not combine the ban and tax? Set a ban date and begin taxiing to incentive people to change their habits sooner.
The Environmental Sustainability Board should be concentrating on things that are actually a problem in Decatur, not focusing on something that is not a problem in Decatur because we do not have any large retailers (save for the little Kroger or CVS) that use large amounts of plastic bags.
I, for one, use 100% of my plastic bags to pick up my dogs poop when we take walks around the ‘hood twice a day. If plastic bags are banned – I will have to buy them anyway. But then again, I very rarely grocery shop within the city limits of Decatur so they would not be impacted.
I agree with George. Focus on something that is actually a problem in Decaur that impacts the environment – like ending car dependency and walkability and changing our zoning codes to promote such goals.
This is just a waste of time.
The world needs to decrease its use of plastic containers, grocery bags, styrofoam containers, styrofoam packing peanuts, etc. as much as we can. Whatever we can eliminate we should try and do so. Google “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” if you want to see one place all this junk ends up. It’s not pretty…
Fine Fred,
Then lets address THAT problem by banning the City of Decatur Sanitation Department from disposing of plastic in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
Agree with others who pointed out the relatively few sources of plastic bags within our fair little city. A ban would seem to be largely symbolic, which is not to say it wouldn’t be worthwhile. A case can always be made for acting in accordance with your professed values, even if the specific impact will be small.
Anyhow, I actually make a point of not taking my own bags to the grocery store occasionally, since I need to have a few plastic ones on hand, mainly for disposing of the biohazards the pets produce. And in that, it seems I’m not alone. So what I’d love is for the Envir. Sust. Board to put some energy toward finding and promoting alternatives to what we RE-USE plastic bags for. Example: put together a one-sheet how-to on how to safely compost pet waste AND find some sources Decatur residents can use to obtain ongoing supplies of fresh sawdust (the requirement that stymied me, when I looked into setting it up).
Biohazards? Really??? Explain!!
Me thinks Biohazard = Poop. !!!???…***”””!!!
I guess you’ve never smelled cat pee.
Of course I have. I used to date!
I wish the Environmental Sustainability Board would take a look at the use of gasoline powered leaf blowers and their contribution to air and noise pollution.
A gas-powered leaf-blower emits as much tailpipe emissions during one hour of use as an automobile traveling across 350 miles. While a car spreads its air pollution over a wide area, the leaf blower will concentrate its emissions in your yard (or your neighbor’s).
Leaf blowers also cause small particles like dirt, pesticides and animal droppings to disperse into the air, which can affect one’s respiratory system. Furthermore, the force of a leaf blower’s dry air upon the ground can dehydrate your soil, leading to irreversible topsoil erosion.
And don’t get me going about the noise of 3 blowers at the same time.
AMEN. One of my neighbors uses a landscape contractor that blows their property for 30 minutes every week, year-round, whether it needs it or not. When there are no leaves on the ground, the guy goes really slowly, covering every inch, and also spends some time blowing the dirt and dust from the gutter out into the middle of the street, just past the center line. (Guess his boss doesn’t want to bill them for time not actually spent on their property.)
right on Jilyco. I hate those things.
I second Jilyco on leaf blowers.
Plastic bags … really? This is the job of government?
Talk about feel good environmentalism. Grrrrr
Now that we have an Evirnmental Sustainablity Board it HAS to justify its existence somehow. How would we have ever know that our little town’s use of plastic bags was responsible for the existence of Great Pacific Gyre.
It will be great for the restaurants to offer alternative take-out containers with paper bags. The grocery stores can do the same or try to get the public to use the re-useable bags more. With the way the economy is, one more tax or tax increase is out of the question.
Ban ‘em
If you got ‘em
I can’t remember all the questions but I do remember my answer to a question about why I don’t consistently use re-usable shopping bags. It’s easy–I FORGET TO BRING THEM IN THE STORE. I have a ton in my trunk. By the time I remember that I left them in my car, 3/4 of my groceries have been scanned, there’s six glaring people behind me in line, and even if someone else is with me, it’s probably my son who would die of embarrassment if he had to actually run in a public place to get something for me.
Effective intervention? They need to station someone in front of all the grocery and drug stores to ask people as they come in, “Do you need a re-usable bag?” Those of us with a stash in the car can quickly get them and, for the rest, returnable bags could be handed out, really ugly ones that say “Property of XXXX. Unlawful to use for private use”. The shopping cart stands in the parking lot could have a place to drop off the ugly re-usable bags. (Isn’t this a great idea! I want credit for the Karass Green Shopping Initiative).
Do you think people will repack once they get to the car and return the bags? Maybe return them on the next trip? I have doubts. But I do like the idea!
How many of you take the one-item-per-bag out of the dozen plastic bags you walk out of the store with for your 10 items (two are double-bagged) and put all of your items in one bag once you get to the car? I see those bags left in the cart — I know you’re out there.
I have thought for years that every major chain (grocery stores, drug stores, big box stores) should have a sign posted at the checkout counter that says something like, “Would you like your bags packed full or light?” Full and light don’t exactly match but, when I was a “courtesy clerk” at Kroger, that’s what made the difference — either people wanted to save bags or they needed the bags to be light in order to carry them.
Re returning the reusable bags: My idea was that the shopping cart corrals (or whatever they’re called) would have a place to leave the bags. Many shoppers would probably be lazy and just leave the bags in the carts, but that’s ok too. The only folks that I think are likely to drive off with the ugly, “Property of XXXX. Unlawful to use for private use” reusable bags would be the shoppers with just one or two bags who don’t use a cart. Could the reusable bags be made of something that is no more harmful to the environment than the current plastic bags?
Or they could just say “I love Justin Beiber” in large letters.
I will keep using plastic bags when I grocery shop b/c I need the bags at home to take care of the cat litter. If I don’t get the bags for free, I will still have to buy them. Also, what about all the bags we are required to use for our trash? And, how about the fact that some of those reusable bags have unsafe amounts of lead in them? That’s not exactly what I want to carry my groceries home in to feed my children.
snore
Cat litter doesn’t have to be a reason to pollute. If you’re willing to buy the bags anyway, consider buying the biodegradable kind (as Nuttshell said, they have them here: http://www.eco-homestore.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=167_177&products_id=146&zenid=q88jsrg0bt3t7jdrs7si5j2qu0). This is also good for those of us who need to pick up after our dogs.
You can find a wide variety of inexpensive reusable bags made from hemp and other natural materials at http://www.reuseit.com/store/bags-totes-c-238.html. They also have many other green products.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we have a wonderful new store here in Decatur called Likerish (in the building to the right of Greene’s on Trinity) which sells all kinds of “green” items, both functional and fun. They have fair pricing, too — I buy the Seventh Generation dishwashing gel and the price at Likerish is comparable to Kroger. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather spend my money at a local shop; especially one doing so much to further green initiatives.
I think we should all at least be willing to try to reduce our use and acceptance of plastic, styrofoam, excess packaging, and frivolous waste in general. It’s not that hard to do and it benefits everyone. And if you forget your bags and have to use plastic, remind your bagger not to be wasteful — fill the bags, don’t double-bag, and PLEASE don’t put a gallon of milk with a handle in a plastic bag!!!
Remember, Americans eventually came to accept the idea of eating their big mac out of a paper box instead of a styrofoam one. Surely in time we can get past using so many plastic bags, too.
I’m going to shop outside of Decatur if I’m going to have to worry if I have enough reusable bags in the car. I’ll let some other community get my money.
Really? All over plastic bags? Wow
How many of DM’s readers do their primary grocery shopping at Little Kroger? No attitude, just wondering. Me? I use the Publix at Emory Commons.
DecaturRight, it’s not just about Decatur. It’s about doing what we can as individuals to make a bigger difference for our planet. No matter where we shop. No biggie, though. Wouldn’t want you to have to worry.
Ban, tax, I don’t care. Just get rid of the plastic bags and styrofoam.
Taxes should never be implemented to encourage or discourage behavior. Taxes should only be implemented as a revenue generator. It’s really that simple.
What sort of taxes don’t encourage or discourage behavior?
All taxes, by their very nature, encourage or discourage different types of behavior.
Maybe I should have been more clear. Yes, an income tax for example, encourages/discourages behavior, but that is not the stated goal of the tax. If the tax is for revenue purposes and has unintended consequences that affects behavior, so be it. It is a different story though when the intended purpose of the tax is to manipulate behavior. I hope that clears it up.
How do we establish intent?
When they clearly state it!!! Granted, as a man with a healthy distrust of government, I am not going to say that there are not taxes in place under the guise of revenue that were intended from the start to influence behavior. However, with this case, cigarettes, soda, etc., the STATED intent of the tax is to influence behavior. Don’t think it’s appropriate.
In full disclosure, I use grocery bags for my dog. But that last time this came up, someone pointed out that the bags you get in the pet store for waste, are biodegradable. Which the grocery bags are not. If plastic bags are eliminated, I suspect those of us who use them for waste, would obviously have to start using those bags, which wouldn’t be horrible.
I also remember reading that it doesn’t cost much, if anything more, to make the plastic grocery bags biodegradable.
And get rid of styro too. Really irks me that Chick-fil-A still uses them. Not to mention, the lids barely stay on the shakes, and in the summer one popped off in the car creating a major mess. I have noticed the shake/ill fitting lid issue every time I have gotten one.
Seriously, if Decatur bans plastic bags what about the Pay As You Throw bags? Can we have it both ways?
IKEA stopped providing free plastic bags, but has big, sturdy reusable bags for $.50. For a while they had an announcement about how much plastic this saved, though no word on what it saved them.
That was briefly discussed at the last ESB meeting, but the City (rightfully so) knows that it has enough problems with PAYT bags that going to something more eco-friendly is not in the cards right now.
A lot of people here seem to think that placing small tax on plastic bags would be a horrible case of nanny-statism, of “telling people what they should do.” But the justification for the tax is pretty straightforward. Assuming that the widespread use of plastic bags is bad for the environment–worse than using reusable bags–then the people who use those bags ought to be the ones who bear the costs associated with using them, including the environmental costs, rather than shifting those costs onto the public at large.
So believers in the power of a free market ought to support a tax on plastic bags, as otherwise the environmental costs associated with them are a “negative externality” which distorts the market. A brief explanation is at http://economics.fundamentalfinance.com/negative-externality.php , but here is an excerpt:
“A negative externality occurs when an individual or firm making a decision does not have to pay the full cost of the decision. If a good has a negative externality, then the cost to society is greater than the cost consumer is paying for it. Since consumers make a decision based on where their marginal cost equals their marginal benefit, and since they don’t take into account the cost of the negative externality, negative externalities result in market inefficiencies unless proper action is taken [...]
A common example of a negative externality is pollution. For example, a steel producing firm might pump pollutants into the air. While the firm has to pay for electricity, materials, etc., the individuals living around the factory will pay for the pollution since it will cause them to have higher medical expenses, poorer quality of life, reduced aesthetic appeal of the air, etc. Thus the production of steel by the firm has a negative cost to the people surrounding the factory–a cost that the steel firm doesn’t have to pay.”