Posted on 10/23/2014 4:08:41 PM PDT by Rusty0604
California made history late last month in a manner that only its legislature could. ... the state became the first in the nation to outlaw plastic bags statewide.
In both environmental and fiscal measures, bag bans are unqualified failures. This ban will engender no positive outcomes for our environment and in turn only toughen the job climate. And yet it gets even worse ...
Here, greedy special interests and desperate legislators struck an agreement to allow grocers to retain all the paper bag fees in return for their support of the legislation. Projected to earn as much as $1 billion in new revenue, the grocers gladly obliged. With the help of the grocers lobbyists, legislators in Sacramento had the necessary air cover to ignore the environmental science and potential for dramatic job loss.
Plastic bags generate fully 80 percent less solid waste than paper bags. They require 70 percent less energy to manufacture and 91 percent less energy to recycle. They occupy 85 percent less landfill space than bulky paper alternatives.
According to a lifecycle analysis by the United Kingdoms environmental authority, shoppers would need to reuse their reusable totes 131 times before it became more environmentally advantageous ...
But the problems with reusable bags arent simply limited to its gross environmental failings. They also pose a growing public health risk, as demonstrated by a particularly disturbing vignette from Oregon, where a girls soccer team was stricken by the Norovirus traced to a reusable tote.
In the seven years since San Francisco became the first American municipality to ban plastic bags in 2007, researchers have tracked a 5-percent increase in death from food-borne illness. ... According to a 2011 white paper by the International Association for Food Protection, a majority of reusable bags contain coliform bacteria.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Ft. Collins Colorado backed off or enforcing a non reusable bag ban off the table after about 2,500 signatures against.
Government in Cali just likes to show that it has the power to push the people around.
One does not have to be too very old to remember the phony “environmental concerns” that led to the introduction of plastic bags in the first place. It was to save the trees from being cut down and used for paper grocery bags.
That’s right — the eco-kooks were the ones who forced us into plastic bags in the first place.
Lefties are a blight.
More Lib insanity.
Their early excuse was that too many errant bags would take off across parking lots and streets.
I haven’t seen an errant bag blowing across a store parking lot or street in ages.
Give them a few years and the Libs will be complaining about the contamination caused by reusable bags.
Liberals love killing people for their utopian fantasies.
Now the lefties with their reusable cloth bags are getting botulism poisoning by not washing the bags after meat juices leaked and then a week later they placed their organic lettuce in the fetid bags.
Just desserts.
Morgan Hill passed a plastic bag ban a few months ago. A local store now uses green colored plastic bags printed with the word “Reusable” on them. I’m wondering if the state ban specifies “single use” bags. These aren’t since they’re clearly reusable. :=)
My family just bought a whole bunch off the internet and we use them to bag our groceries. Take that, California.
What do they use for dog poop?
I remember all of that.
I want to do the same, where do you find them?
I wish I could say I opposed this but here we live two miles from the main road and we see plastic bags on the barbwire fence all the time. They’re not ours, they’re not our neighbors, so they must have blown in from who knows where.
As much as I enjoy the convenience of these bags I’d be okay with having my own bags or using paper.
There was a time when the environmentalists warned us of the coming Ice Age, and told us to use plastic bags instead of paper.
If a dog poops on our property we use a rifle. (-:
(Seriously, we do shoot dogs when we see them on the ranch because they LOVE to chase the livestock)
I remember that. They also pushed gasoline additives that turned out to not do anything other than make gas more expensive.
My daughter used to live in Corvallis. It’s such a beautiful place. She moved to be closer to family, but wants to go back.
Bag up my purchase for free, or put it back on the shelf and refund my money. Your choice.
Funny it only didn’t work one time...
They should ban dog owners from using plastic too! It’s such a terrible thing these plastic bags. They should use their left hands and their pockets, bring it home to their garden or local democratic precinct office.
And to quit using aerosol hair spray. I guess everybody overdid their part, because we went from impending ice age to global warming real fast.
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