Plastic Bags

I remember that when I was in high school, science fair projects tended to be pretty cheesy.  It sounds like things have changed very significantly.   Seen in The Record:

[W]e produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the animals that eat them.

Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster — in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

He was able to identify a couple of bacteria, one that loves to eat plastic, and the other that loves to support the plastic-eating bacteria.  Create a bacteria soup, drop in plastic bags, wait three months, êt voilá!

So, when can we start getting the necessary vats o’ bacteria set up at the local recycling plant?

So, the Connecticut state legislature is considering a ban on nonbiodegradable plastic bags by 2010.

As you might expect, the local press has a few thoughts on the matter.

For example, consider this comment from the Courant’s op-ed page:

A bill before the General Assembly would prohibit retailers from distributing non-biodegradable plastic bags to customers, and hit them with hefty fines if they do. It might make sense to phase in such a ban, but the goal is worthy.

Disposable plastic bags are a symptom of a society that lives wastefully because it can. For a variety of reasons, from peak oil prices to global warming, we must live more sensibly. Yes, plastic bags are great for lining household wastebaskets and other things. But they are a convenience we can easily live with in moderation.

Meanwhile, The Day offers a bit of common sense as its rebuttal:

And aren’t we facing bigger environmental problems? Why are we still selling Hummers and other gas guzzling cars? Littering is already against the law — how about a little enforcement?

In America, it seems it’s always all or nothing, black or white. No shades of gray.

We don’t have to be purists all the time and we don’t need Uncle Sam monitoring our every move.

Rather than punishing everyone for the recycling indiscretions of a few, can’t we just agree to do a better job than we’re now doing?

I wish I had paid attention to there having been a public hearing on the bill. Because, while I’ve been making the change to reusable shopping bags, I still like having access to plastic bags on occasion.

Part of that is for reasons mentioned elsewhere—doggy doo cleaning; mini trash bags. However, I don’t recall having heard anyone from the disabled community speak up on the subject.

For folks with limited mobility and/or chronic pain issues, having something small, easy-to-carry, and difficult-to-overload to carry around stuff is a godsend. While there are alternatives, I’m not familiar with any working as well or as being as readily available as the ubiquitous plastic bag.

Seen in the AJC:

Whole Foods [...] will eliminate plastic grocery bags at all of its stores in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. The chain estimates it will keep 100 million plastic bags out of circulation between Earth Day and the end of the year by banning their use.

Wal-Mart’s been trying to rebrand itself in a green (or at least pseudo-green) manner as of late. I wonder if it’s time for the activists to start encouraging Wally World to quit ordering their smiley-face emblazoned plastic bags.

Seen at Inhabitat:

It seems that plastic shopping bags are really on the way out. It started with San Francisco, Hong Kong, then Melbourne and other cities, and now, beginning in July, all plastic shopping bags in the entire country of China will no longer be free. As part of China’s attempts to reduce their extreme pollution problem, the policy will call for a small charge for plastic bags in China that must be shown clearly in all supermarket receipts.

Furthermore, ultra-thin plastic bags are now banned from being produced at all. As part of this effort, the government is encouraging the use of reusable bags and cloth sacks, and increasing efforts to recycle all plastic bags still in use.

If 2007 was the year that my household switched to CFLs, perhaps 2008 will be the year that we start using cloth bags in lieu of plastic…to a certain extent, anyway.

All those plastic bags we pick up along the way do, after all, come in handy when walking the dog….

Seen on the wire:

City leaders approved a ban on plastic grocery bags after weeks of lobbying on both sides from environmentalists and a supermarket trade group. San Francisco would be the first U.S. city to adopt such a rule if Mayor Gavin Newsom signs the ban as expected.

The law, approved 10-1, requires large markets and drug stores to offer customers bags made of paper that can be recycled, plastic that breaks down easily enough to be made into compost, or reusable cloth.[.]

The 50 grocery stores that would be most affected by the law argued that the ban was not reasonable because plastic bags made of corn byproducts are a relatively new, expensive and untested product. Some said they might offer only paper bags at checkout.

As someone who has paid his dues by taking the bus to the grocery store in college, and by toting groceries home from the neighborhood market when living in a city, I’ve got to say that not having had access to plastic bags would have been a pain. It just seems easier to tote around multiple plastic bags than to lug paper bags around. The annoyance of being limited to paper bags would likely have just provided added incentive to drive to the grocery store, rather than walking or using public transport.

And surely, the last thing San Francisco needs is more driving.

OK, it’s also probably true that paper bags could be redesigned to address the ease-of-carrying issue I mentioned. However, I do wonder if there could have been a less intrusive way to achieve the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ goals would have been to encourage more recycling of plastic bags, or to incent folks to choose paper over plastic when practical.

For example, my local grocery stores here on the east coast accept plastic bags for recycling. And, being asked to pay a few cents deposit per plastic bag would create an incentive to recycle.

If you wish to avoid being asked the dreaded question, “paper or plastic?” you may wish to consider visiting Zanzibar, according to this BBC news story:

Authorities on the semi-autonomous Tanzanian islands say discarded bags damage the marine environment and hurt its crucial tourism industry.

The government, which approved the law in July, has suggested the use of raffia bags as an alternative. [...]

“We have to put the environment above everything,” Zanzibar’s Director of Environment Ali Juma said.

“Besides being an eyesore, plastic bags are very damaging to land and marine life and we are already threatened by the rapid pace of development.”

He said that anyone violating the ban risked a jail sentence of up to six months or a fine of $2,000 or both punishments.