Banning Plastic Bags Has Unintended Consequences
Santa Clara County wants to ban the plastic bags grocery stores pack food in and tax paper bags. The Recycling and Waste Reduction Commission will ask county supervisors and the 15 cities, including San Jose where I live, to adopt the proposal. This is a reversal of their proposal of a few month ago, developed after a year of study, to encourage recycling.
I'm all for saving the environment. We recycle, compost all organic waste, combine errands, do push ups and eat broccoli. We re-use the bags to line our garbage containers. If we were forced to use heavy "re-usable" bags to carry our groceries we would have to buy plastic garbage bags. Not only would we use more plastic than before (bought bags + re-usable bags) but would spend more money too! Re-usable bags can be used several times but will eventually need cleaning and/or replacement.
If we did without garbage bags we would have to use precious soap and water and time to wash our indoors garbage containers every day and the outdoor garbage cart weekly. We want our food to be transported in clean containers so would likely wash any re-usable bags at least weekly. I live with a very safety conscious person so we must have clean food, inside and out.
Some people may prefer to use boxes or other packaging that the items were shipped in, much like what happens at Costco. Some people prefer canvas or heavy re-usable plastic bags. There is nothing to prevent them from doing so and stores can help make these choices easier by keeping extra boxes ready by the checkout stand.
Charging a fee for paper while banning plastic doesn't seem fair. Making paper is an awfully chemical and energy intensive industry that uses trees as raw material. We can't re-use the paper bags for garbage because anything wet destroys their strength and garbage falls out.
I'm thinking our Waste Commission doesn't understand that ill formed rules can have unintended consequences. They say they are worried about our land fill problem. Perhaps if fewer meetings were held there would be fewer memos and less hot air? Do commissioners get paid? We certainly have budget problems here in San Jose.
If our landfill problem is big enough to justify a Commission I am very surprised I wasn't consulted first! Naturally I have the common sense solution. It is clear that we should save the costs and pollution created by the commission. The solution is to reduce the size of the standard garbage containers provided by trash service. Smaller containers = less garbage = less landfill problem. People who choose to continue to produce loads of waste can pay extra for the super size garbage carts. The extra revenue can pay for more landfills. People on the margin can use fewer grocery bags or they can wash baby's diapers rather than buying disposables or cough up the extra fee for a larger container. At least they can figure out what is important to them rather than be scolded by the nanny state. People like us won't be affected because our containers are only 1/2 full each week.
4/28/2009 (c) Copyright Carl Wohlforth
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