Down with plastic!

That's a lot of wasted plastic
Are you doing your part?
I'm trying to do mine.

I spent the better part of the evening a meeting of the newly-forming Saratoga Sustainability task force, whose first meeting I covered for work.

The meeting was interesting, though, as one person in attendance pointed out, everyone there is already in the choir. Including me, of course. One thing that was brought up at the meeting was the scourge of plastic bags that leak from shops, restaurants, museums, and even doctor's offices around Saratoga, and pretty much everywhere else too.

Plastic bags are something that I've decided to make a statement on in my own life by taking cloth shopping bags with me anytime I hit the grocery store. My trusty messenger bag is almost always adequate for day-to-day shopping that comes up outside of my weekly run to the Ghetto Chopper. For others, this concept appears to be much more of a challenge, and I routinely see people leaving the chopper with relatively small quantity of groceries swaddled in a veritable cloud of white plastic.

Makes me sick. And, don't even get me started on talking about how, even if you eschew plastic for cloth or middle-of-the-road paper, most of your food is still coming packaged in plastic. For the longest time, I was buying pre-sliced cold-cuts for lunch, because I thought the tupperware containers it came in were recyclable ... they aren't. Instead, I was inadvertently sending still more plastic to the landfill. Uhg. I've since switched back to regular deli-sliced turkey, which comes in a slightly smaller amount of plastic. At home, some of our delis used to wrap cold cuts in wax paper... what happened to that?

Too Greenpeacy for you?
Sorry... just wanted to make the point
platic kills pengiuns. Do you want to kill a penguin?

So anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that I hope the sustainability task force gains traction with a number of issues they're working on, including plastic bags. Everyone has a knot of old bags under their kitchen sink, and no one knows what to do with them.

Sure, they can be recycled (if you happen to live near a recycler), but it would be far better to not manufacture them in the first place.

So, read this article in The Times about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to impose a 6 cent per bag surcharge on plastic bags in the city, as some European countries already do. It's an interesting take that points out that ditching plastic isn't as universally-loved a concept as you might think it would be, or might like it to be.

What I took away from the article is that people like the spontenaity afforded to them by plastic bags. You don't have to keep bulky coth bags with you all the time, and you don't have to plan your shopping. Well, that's good and fine, but we can't have it both ways, and if a small surcharge is one way to convince people that they ought not use plastic bags, then the city should do it. If you ask me, an ounce of forsight is an easy way to save 6 cents, but that's just me.

It seems to me that such a charge would fall into a similar category as the state tax on cigarettes. Raising the tax raises money for the state, but also drives some smokers to quit, or shoppers to use different bags. It's a good way to raise money in the short term, but the government should not look to it as a long term financial solution, because, hopefully, someday no one will be smoking or using plastic bags, and certainly not using both at the same time. I suppose then the government will have to impose a tax on high-fructose corn syrup, or whatever the next thing they want us to quit is...