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Chile Becomes First Country In Americas To Ban Plastic Bags (ewn.co.za)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Eyewitness News: Chile's Senate has passed a bill that will prohibit the use of plastic bags in stores, with a vote in their House of Representatives overwhelmingly in favor of the measure, with 134 supporting the bill and one abstention. According to The Independent, the new law would give large retailers one year to phase out the use of plastic bags, and smaller businesses two years. This makes Chile the first country in the Americas to ban plastic bags, and officially recognize how important such a ban would be in the effort to reduce unnecessary single-use plastic waste.
At first, the measure was only meant to ban plastic bags in Patagonia, but it was approved by both the senate and president for the entire country. The Association of Plastic Industries registered Chile as using 3,400 million plastic bags per year, or 200 per person. Telesur reports that the Minister of the Environment, Marcela Cubillos, said the country needs a larger cultural change for people to start replacing plastic with reusable bags.
At first, the measure was only meant to ban plastic bags in Patagonia, but it was approved by both the senate and president for the entire country. The Association of Plastic Industries registered Chile as using 3,400 million plastic bags per year, or 200 per person. Telesur reports that the Minister of the Environment, Marcela Cubillos, said the country needs a larger cultural change for people to start replacing plastic with reusable bags.
Paper bags? How did people survive before plastic bags were invented?
The ocean pollution problem apparently comes from ten rivers located in Asia. North and South America are not killing whales. This is just another pointless feel-good move to show that "they care" in Chile.
That's great and all, but where am I supposed to put pet waste? I can't flush litter box bombs down the toilet, because the litter will clog it. (I've tried) Damned if I'm going to use a reuseable bag for that...
Flush the cat.
Problem solved.
They write thousand million
Letting a perfectly good milliard go to waste.
Does this mean that Hillary Clinton won't be allowed in the country?
It isn't just cat litter. I also use the plastic bags for all the trash can liners in the house since the City wants all garbage bagged. They aren't as strong as a real trash can liner, but they work. The extras get donated to the church food bank for people to use to take home the stuff they pick up there. They aren't single use for a great many people, and having to buy higher grade plastic bags to replace their second use is crazy.
The problem, here, isn't the bags: It's the people who can't bother to dispose of them properly. Can we ban the lazy, inconsiderate people, instead?
Paper bags? How did people survive before plastic bags were invented?
It isn't like paper bags have no environmental footprint.
So people will whine about that. I'm not certain that recycled paper will be very good for grocery bags, because every time paper is recycled, the individual fibers get shorter and shorter. I think Trader Joe's uses recycled, and their paper bags are pretty weak.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Stop using practice-babies and have an actual baby instead. And use cloth, not disposable.
The "actual baby" is only for wealthy people today. https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Obviously some folks rely on the guvmint to help, but yeah, it cost my wife and I over a quarter million to raise one kid.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Take a step back and think about whether it should even be culturally acceptable to walk around a neighborhood and shit on sidewalks and lawns. Maybe plastic bags are an answer to an absurd question?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They sort of are...the sun degrades them into tiny tiny bits, fish eat them and then you eat the fish. It's the cycle of life from Disney's "Lion King" franchise, just with toxic petroleum products.
Have gnu, will travel.
The ocean pollution problem apparently comes from ten rivers located in Asia. North and South America are not killing whales. This is just another pointless feel-good move to show that "they care" in Chile.
That's pretty much my assessment - macro sized plastic from third world countries, and microsphere plastic from developed places.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/1...
http://www.digitaljournal.com/...
Cites provided because the prominent search results blame countries that already recycle a lot of plastic. Making someone in those countries feel guilty about themselves, while doing nothing about the Pacific Rim countries will accomplish exactly nothing.
This is not to say plastic in the oceans is not a problem. It's that completely eliminating the first world contributions to the problem will stall out at a 10 percent reduction.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
As a NYer I hate paper bags because roaches love them.
And I love plastic bags from the store because I put my garbage in them and each time I leave the apartment I throw out my trash.
This is far superior to reusable bags in which I must then BUY plastic garbage bags. Now that's retarded.
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Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Sure, but a whole lot of them didnâ(TM)t live and died from Salmonella and other diseases. There will be an uptick as always happens in areas banning plastic bags. Taking away sanitation in all forms does seem like a progressive goal given the current state of California.
Soft drinks are a much worse waste of plastic. Every day at lunch i have a bottle. The weight of a bottle far exceeds that of a plastic bag (a hundred times?). A bag is an environmental problem as they travel and get places but really bottles are much worse problem surely? Soft drink companies really need to think about this as they have to be the worst offenders by a huge margin. Capitalism sure!y has to take some blame as if someone made it expensive to create these then a solution would be found? Future generations will look at us with shame and we obviously are just ignoring it but know better.
If I have a discussion with, say, a non-techie on, say, power usages, and most of the figures we quote are of the order of magnitude of some hundreds of kiloWatts, then it makes perfect sense to treat an outlier as several thousand kiloWatts, and not as a few Megawatts, it seems to me. An engineer would immediately folow me making a jump into Megawatts, a non-techie not necessarily so.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I was skeptical of that fact, then we did the math out-loud in my office and I'm starting to suspect that is an extreme low-ball estimate. Daycare alone is $10-12,000 a year so you're halfway there by the time their 10 years old. The additional food cost is probably negligible, but the medical and, eventually, the auto insurance sure as hell isn't. Then clothing and after school activities would easily put you over that mark. That doesn't even mention vacations. It's a quarter million to raise a child, but how much is it to raise a functional kid?
Do your realize that your downsides also apply to plastic? Poisonous chemicals and decomposition in landfills are problems for plastic bags too.
Saving the Earth is very rational - there is no replacement for the planet in the foreseeable future.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Nobody is banning anyone from buying plastic garbage bags. The ban is on plastic grocery bags.
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If your dual use is also going to be a heavier weight plastic bag - which virtually all trash can liners are - then reusing the first bag is definitely a win. Just because the heavier weight bag - more plastic - takes longer to break down doesn't change the fact that it also will break down. I fail to see where the time difference matters. As long as it is still a plastic bag - why not pick the one that has less plastic?
And yes, all of us know that the cost of the bags are rolled into the overhead of the store and we end up paying something for them anyway. But the amount that is charged for those bags is much less than the cost of the off the shelf bags - because they are cheap and not well made - but serviceable for many uses.
Let's start a movement to ban the manufacture of trash can liner bags and rely on the plastic bags at the checkout line. It would make more sense.
The comments so far that I have read anout how this is bad are basically reduced to "This is an inconvinience for me." and then tryt to find another reason. So here is how it works in places where they are already doing this.
Instead of using a bag one time, you take a cotton bag that you can use many times over years. You take it with you when you go shopping. Sure, you will forget it a few times, but most people are not snowflakes and will start to remember, just like you remember to take your phone with you.
Where I live most people can not use the bag for trash anyway. You need to buy special bags for special garbage. So there is no gain there.
The single use items need to stop. I just bought 4 microSD cards and the amount of garbadge I got with it is immense. I get a SD sleeve (or whatever it is called) that I do not need. They are placed in a plastic that I do not need inside an even bigger plastic that is put inside a carton. That was the put inside a box that was filled with filling paper. 4 microSD cards Could have bneen send in an envelope, yet they decided to use the size of a small shoebox. I guess 99.9% waste.
I also use 1 use-based items, because I am as lazy as the rest (and perhaps even more so as I do this at work), yet I changed my behaviour in using plastic bags and I did not try to sweasel my way out of it and find excuses. I adapted my behaviour and after a month it was ok.
So now when I go shopping, I take two small nags that are both the size of a wallet with me. I always have at least one with me at all times in case I suddenly need it. Something like this and yes, they exist in other materials as well, but you need to search foir yourself as I am lazy and my shift is almost over.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
As a NYer I hate paper bags because roaches love them.
But it depends on the environment around them. Roaches just don't sprout on paper unless there's edible stuff (home trash, food particles, etc) around them.
And I love plastic bags from the store because I put my garbage in them and each time I leave the apartment I throw out my trash.
That's what I do.
This is far superior to reusable bags in which I must then BUY plastic garbage bags. Now that's retarded.
It is only far superior from a point of convenience, not environmental sustainability. Yeah, maintaining the environment carries costs.
With that said, a lot of these problems with plastic bags is the lack of a proper recycling policy.
In Japan, people are meticulous how they pack their garbage. Pet litter, diapers, chemicals, and toxic stuff on one bin. Kitchen garbage on another bin. Recyclable paper on another bin. Plastics, aluminum cans and glass on another bin. All other in yet another bin.
People do it and stick to it. Then government facilities sort all that shit out in whatever way is best.
When we go about banning plastic bags is because our garbage disposal systems suck and we have no way to contain the flood of plastics, be it in Chile or in the US. It's really that simple.
Banning plastics bags is an abdication that we cannot - technically and culturally - dispose of our garbage properly.
Better than nothing I guess, so hooray?
It's a milliard. We already have it.
Ezekiel 23:20
Paper bags? How did people survive before plastic bags were invented?
It isn't like paper bags have no environmental footprint.
True but those costs won't be quite as externalized. Paper bags left along the side of the road will turn into mush and decompose pretty quickly. Plastic bags left along the side of the road will sit there till the state has to clean them up.
I guess they don't get the unintended consequences of things like that. When they did that in California, they eliminated the only refuge for the homeless to dispose of their waste in a sanitary manner.
It's why there's so much human feces all over the streets and sidewalks in San Francisco and San Diego these days. And where the hepatitis outbreaks came from.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia