Plastic Bags: Popular Myths and Their Truths

Myth: Bag fees don’t change human behavior
Truth: They don’t if they are too small. A nickel a bag doesn’t change behavior but $0.20 or $0.25 a bag does. While smaller bag fees provide funds for municipalities, they don’t cause enough pain to get people to mend their ways.

Myth: Our city doesn’t have a litter problem
Truth: Wake up! You just aren’t seeing it, or your residents are dumping them in someone else’s back yard. Through storm sewers and waterways, they find their way to the coast and beyond, impacting large numbers of wildlife.

Myth: Charging for something previously free is unconstitutional.
Truth: You are paying for them in higher prices at the checkout and in the petroleum products used to make them.

Myth: We reuse our plastic bags for other things like pet litter and lining wastebaskets, so they make sense.
Truth: They have their uses, but if you buy pet litter bags, they are biodegradable and you only buy what you will use.

Myth: Recycling makes more sense than charging for bags.
Truth: Do the math. It costs $34/ton to make them, and $4,000 to recycle them. At most, only 3% of bags are recycled.

Myth: Why single out plastic bags with fees? Paper bags are resource-intensive, too.
Truth: Plastic bag tax laws also include paper bags. The behavior we’re seeking is bringing your own sturdy reusable bags.

Myth: Reusable bags are so unsanitary, they will spread disease.
Truth: Yeah, right. Obviously anything reusable (like our clothes) has to be washed periodically. Throw them in with a load of towels or whatever.

Myth: It’s uncool to bring your own bags. You look miserly.
Truth: In Ireland, as soon as the plastic bag tax passed, anyone carrying plastic bags became socially unacceptable. If carrying around old tote bags with company logos on them bothers you, make some of your own and design your statement, or flowers, or whatever. If you have your own business, put YOUR logo on your bags and get free press.

- (excerpted from Reusablebags.com)

Filling the World with Trash

Each year, I come out to our place in the high plains in Colorado and pick up the trash dumped in this pristine environment. Next season I come back, and it’s back. Our country is pretty enlightened about trash disposal. When people toss their trash from their cars, it’s not because they don’t have anywhere else to put it. It’s because they don’t care that they are taking away from the scenic beauty and putting wildlife at risk. That’s both an educational and penalty issue.

In developing parts of the world, more often the problem is the lack of safe disposal sites for trash. In some villages in Africa we’ve visited, a hole is dug to get clay for pottery, and it becomes the new town landfill. But also in the most remote areas, there is no plastic trash to dispose of. They have no access to it.

In other areas, particularly near waterways, access to plastic bags is plentiful, but access to trash disposal is not. People are trying to subsist and are not thinking about trashing their world. They are thinking about surviving it. Where in our priorities is reduction of non-biodegradable trash and containment of vermin-attracting dumps? My friend Sue took this picture of plastic bag litter in Siem Reap, Cambodia, jumping-off place for the famed Angkor Wat. People travel from all over the world to see these fabled temples, but they don’t come to see this. More to the point, the people living there should have a better, healthier environment. How do we make that happen, and become catalysts for change—all over the world?

Become informed. Visit some of the following websites and get involved:
www.commondreams.org
www.bagsmart.com.au
http://plasticbags.planetark.org