All across the country, cities are considering making possession of a plastic grocery bag as illegal as a gram of marijuana or an unlicensed gun. Okay, maybe not that illegal, but local governments are itching to tell their residents in what they can and cannot carry their groceries.
Apparently a new craze that is sweeping the nation faster than the macarena, the plastic bag is being scapegoated by obviously bored politicians and stark-raving mad tree huggers for polluting our nation’s streets and rivers.
I Googled this anti-plastic bag fad and found a lot of support for this movement, especially from lefty environmentalist groups who scream that plastic bags are destroying the earth. I was disgusted by a lot of what I found. A July 21, 2004 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer interviewed Earth Resource Foundation (ERF), a California-based environmentalist group that is pushing for a statewide 25 cent tax on plastic bags. (I know the article is old but it was quoted as of yesterday 8/07/07 on Common Dreams.org, a web site for “progressives”) This is the kind of fear-mongering talk used by this organization and no doubt other activists and organizations with similar or identical goals.
“Every time we use a new plastic bag they go and get more petroleum from the Middle East and bring it over in tankers,” said Stephanie Barger, executive director of Earth Resource Foundation in Costa Mesa, Calif. “We are extracting and destroying the Earth to use a plastic bag for 10 minutes.”
-”Plastic Left Holding the Bag as Environmental Plague”, Seattle Post Intelligencer, July 21, 2004
Pure bullshit is all I can say about this statement.
First of all, would plastic bags be less harmful to the environment if the petroleum used to make them came from Mexico, Venezuela or Texas? Are there weapons of mass destruction in petroleum from the Middle East? Funny how the Left constantly accuses President Bush for fear-mongering rhetoric and tactics to maintain support for the war in Iraq but employ the same methods when trying to get people to see things their way.
For the record, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy, in 2005, America’s biggest importer of petroleum was Canada at 2,181,000 barrels a day, about 10,000 miles or so from the Middle East. According to the EIA, this is far more than what we imported from OPEC nations (771,000 barrels a day), a group whose six out of twelve member nations are located in the Middle East.
Now let’s move on to the last part of the statement that Americans use plastic bags for only “ten minutes.” This is truly bullshit and reflective of my deeply held belief that most environmental activists are elitists.On a personal note, because of my current income and socioeconomic position, I am a member of America’s lower classes, working poor, whatever you’d like to call it. When I and others in the same economic position use these grocery bags to carry our food home, we usually reuse them as garbage bags. Most apartment buildings in this country have garbage chutes down which apartment dwellers shove their garbage. These chutes are too small to fit the standard size garbage bags one might find in a house, where garbage is carried directly from the home to the curb in metal cans for trash pickup. Therefore, the plastic grocery bags make for a logical and free alternative to purchasing conventional trash bags.
Most poor households I have visited use small wastebaskets to handle household garbage, as do I. Although it means more trips to the garbage chute than a homeowner who uses the much larger kitchen trash bags, it means the grocery bags are being reused for far longer than ten minutes.
Furthermore, because plastic bags are free (with or without purchase, depending if the cashier or manager is paying attention) those bags that are too large too fit into the average residential garbage chute (like the large ones available at Target and other retailers) are used to carry things. Most poor people don’t bother buying a lunch box to carry food to work or on a trip; we use plastic grocery bags.
We use clothing store shopping bags, some of the most durable bags I’ve ever seen for free, to carry everything from laundry to meals. In my home we collect every plastic shopping bag we bring home for future use, provided the bag does not have a hole in it. Wet grocery bags are hung up on the clothesline to dry.
I’ve seen women use plastic grocery bags to keep their hair dry when caught in the rain without an umbrella. When it snows, I always put on plastic produce bags over my socks before putting on snow boots to keep my feet from getting wet from any snow which could find its way inside my boots.
Bear in mind that most poor people (and middle-income people in New York City where driving a car is a luxury to many) do not own cars and often have to walk to get where they’re going all the time. Even with public transportation, there is the task of walking to the bus stop or train station and standing around and waiting. So a trip to the local supermarket, strip mall or shopping center usually requires a lot of walking and therefore a lot of time. Perhaps ten minutes is the time it takes Ms. Barger spends carrying her bagged groceries to her SUV or Hummer and then from the garage to her kitchen. Or maybe that’s how long it takes her housekeeper to do all that.
I and most other poor people could not imagine someone throwing away a perfectly reusable plastic bag. Apparently, Ms. Barger and her elitist buddies at ERF can’t possibly imagine anyone reusing a plastic bag out of sheer necessity.
Want more proof that ERF is run by elitist snobs? Check out this area of the ERF website concerning their Campaign Against the Plastic Plague (CAPP) on some ideas on how people can reuse their plastic bags.
Make plastic bags into jump rope, rugs and hats.
My family and friends laughed when they heard this. To me, this is proof that the ERF is run by people who have little to no connection to the millions of poor people in this country who would have an actual use for plastic bags after bringing them home from the store.
ERF and other organizations claim that the production of plastic bags is a contributor to the rise in demand for petroleum. I tried for about a day and a half to determine how much of the petroleum products consumed in the U.S. is used to produce plastic bags. The answer was very hard to find. After searching the federal government databases, I could not find an exact number of how much petroleum is used to make plastic bags. Given how much of the data I found about petroleum production and consumption is related to fuel and heating oil, I could only assume that a small minority of the petroleum consumed in the U.S. is used for manufacturing plastic checkout bags.
And what about paper grocery bags? The cities that are banning or are planning to ban plastic bags are pushing for grocers to offer paper bags. Weren’t paper bags eventually phased out in the 1990s because they cost more money and natural resources to manufacture and transport than plastic bags? I remember those crappy paper grocery bags. If you didn’t have a shopping cart back then, you’d better hope it wasn’t raining.
I did find one “fact” stated by Sam Shropshire, an alderman in Annapolis Maryland who claimed in a New York Times article that it takes 12 million barrels of crude oil to produce 100 billion checkout bags a year.
The alderman doesn’t explain where he got this information but I thought it would be fun to do a little math to offer some perspective on his “staggering statistic”. According to the EIA, in 2005, Americans consumed about 20 million barrels of petroleum a day. Multiply that number by 365 days, and Americans consumed about 7.5 billion gallons that year. 12 million versus 7.5 billion is really a drop in the bucket.
In fact, if my calculations are correct, 12 million is roughly a little less than 0.16 percent of 7.5 billion, give or take a few hundred thousand. So less than a quarter of a percent of the petroleum consumed in this country was used to manufacture 100 billion plastic checkout bags in 2005.
But wait! On his legislative website, Alderman Shropshire claims that according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans “use in excess of 20 billion plastic bags per year.” I couldn’t find this statistic on the EPA website, but given this “fact”, since 20 billion is 20 percent of 100 billion, 0.16 (the percentage of the U.S. annual petroleum consumption I calculated was used to manufacture 100 billion plastic bags) multiplied by 20 percent is actually 0.032 percent.
Although only 0.16 percent of the petroleum consumed in the U.S. in 2005 was used to create Mr. Shropshire’s hypothetical 100 billion bags, the actual number of plastic bags used in the U.S. every year (let’s say, in 2005) is manufactured using about three-one hundredths of a percent of all the petroleum our country consumed in 2005. Even someone not familiar with percentages and decimals can tell that 0.032 percent is a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the bucket compared to how much petroleum this country consumes annually.
Note: I’m kind of paranoid. Can someone who is really good at crunching numbers do the calculations and see if I am correct? I’m 99 percent sure that I am.
Mr. Shropshire also thinks using plastic grocery bags as garbage bags is a bad idea. I don’t understand: this fool wants to keep plastic bags from becoming street litter, but he doesn’t want anyone to put them where trash is supposed to go? What, does he want people to eat or smoke the plastic bags?
I’m no scientist, but I suspect that there is far less petroleum in a translucent (sometimes clear) plastic grocery bag than there is in the larger, black opaque trash bags (you can actually smell the petroleum in some of those black bags!) he uses in his house. Common sense tells me that the smaller, thin grocery bags will degrade faster than the big, thick black trash bags. If I am wrong, may God send someone my way to enlighten me.
Finally, if plastic bags become litter on rivers and lakes and streets, perhaps the problem is the people doing all this littering! I was raised to put litter in my pockets or bag until I found a proper receptacle (was I the only kid on earth whose parents slapped him for littering?). But I am obviously in the minority in this country, as I too walk the streets of New York and sometimes trip over plastic and paper bags and even packing materials on the sidewalk. Whatever happened to giving out tickets for littering?
The popular solution these days, at least in New York, is to pretend the litter magically appeared (perhaps, divine intervention) on the streets by itself and create Business Improvement Districts (BID) funded by local businesses to pay for crews of workers to sweep up the litter into garbage bags. The businesses who pay the extra fees for the BID pass the costs right along to the consumer, making sure that everyone has to pay for the irresponsibility of a few.
Plastic bags shouldn’t be banned just because some people decide to simply throw it onto the streets. That like banning knives and scissors in order to eliminate stabbings. Besides, if you ban plastic bags and force people to use paper bags, the streets and rivers will probably be strewn with wet brown paper.
What would the punishment be for violating a plastic bag ban, I wonder? If a plastic bag tax was enforced, would people carrying plastic bags in the street have to carry receipts to prove to police they paid the tax on it? Would such a person have to tell the cops they’re reusing the bag, or simply holding it for a friend?
Knowing the corrupt nature of big government, I can only suspect any politician or environmental activist supporting a local ban on plastic bags may be getting all-expenses paid “fact-finding” trips, free gifts and straight out cash bribes from the lobbying arm of the paper bag manufacturing industry to motivate their so-called concern for the environment.
Wow, this entry is so much longer than I intended it to be. God bless you if you’ve made it this far.
In short, let the individual consumer decide if he wants paper, plastic or to use their own bag. Supermarkets should install more self-checkout lines so shoppers can bag their groceries however they so desire. And if a shopper has no imaginable reuse for plastic bags after the first ten minutes of use, let them fill their oversized Gucci bags with groceries, but don’t let them tell the rest of the country what they can and can’t use to carry their groceries home.
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