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New York Becomes America's Third State To Ban Plastic Bags (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and fellow Democrats who control the Legislature have reached a deal to make New York the third state with a ban on single-use plastic grocery bags as they worked to finalize budget agreements, officials said Friday. The ban would prohibit grocery stores from providing plastic bags for most purchases, something California has been doing since a statewide ban was approved in 2016. Hawaii has an effective statewide ban, with all its counties imposing their own restrictions....
New York's ban wouldn't take effect until next March. The plan also calls for allowing local governments the option to impose a 5-cent fee on paper bags, with 3 cents going to the state's Environmental Protection Fund and 2 cents kept by local governments.
Meanwhile, Tennessee's state House and Senate have passed a different kind of bill -- one that bans local Tennessee governments from regulating plastic bags, according to local channel WMC.
One Memphis councilman had proposed allowing the use of plastic bags, but with a seven-cent tax to support clean water initiatives. "But that won't happen if the governor signs the bill to 'ban the bans.'"
New York's ban wouldn't take effect until next March. The plan also calls for allowing local governments the option to impose a 5-cent fee on paper bags, with 3 cents going to the state's Environmental Protection Fund and 2 cents kept by local governments.
Meanwhile, Tennessee's state House and Senate have passed a different kind of bill -- one that bans local Tennessee governments from regulating plastic bags, according to local channel WMC.
One Memphis councilman had proposed allowing the use of plastic bags, but with a seven-cent tax to support clean water initiatives. "But that won't happen if the governor signs the bill to 'ban the bans.'"
I don't mind the ban on plastic bags so much. A lot of grocery stores around me have started giving plastic more often then paper, and the plastic bags are shit and rip too easily. I prefer paper and always ask for them whenever there's an option.
Now, charging for paper bags? Even if its just 5c, that's kinda bullshit.
At least California has legalized marijuana, and New York will likely do so in 2019 or 2020. Jealous? More weed, fewer plastic bags. Maybe some reusable hemp bags, too.
I use plastic bags I get from the stores for kitchen waste, for scooping the cat litter, occasionally to carry packed lunches, and various other things.
So if stores stop giving them out, then I need to buy them instead. The folks who sell (admittedly better quality but also more expensive) bags are probably laughing all the way to the bank.
Environmentally cleaner than putting plastic bags with feces in a landfill. Just wash the sidewalk occasionally.
Laws for the environment = laws for people. We only have one habitable planet, thus far -- pays to treat it kindly.
Good Lord, man, talk about a slippery slope argument. Are you seriously blaming the problem of plastic pollution on lonely garbage men who let plastic bags blow away because they don't have a partner on the truck? And then, due to the banning of disposable plastic shopping bags, forecasting the doom of civilization?
I've been using re-usable cloth shopping bags for the last 5-10 years. I keep them in the trunk of the car. They're durable. I wash them periodically. They work just fine for getting groceries, other kinds of shopping, and even non-commerce related toting. I think I paid about $2.00 for each of them. I've used them hundreds of times.
We should stop producing most disposable plastic bags. Oil is too valuable to make into shitty plastic bags just so someone can use them to carry groceries from the store to the car and then the car to the house. Even if the bags actually made it to the landfill and didn't wind up in the ocean, it would still be a waste. Since they do end up in the ocean, it's even worse.
No it's not kinda shit, it's really just a naked tax grab. And like all taxes, once it's in and more or less accepted as routine, then they'll raise it.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
My actual experience with a free disposable plastic bag ban (what these measures really are) in California has been entirely positive, I have truly not heard anyone complain about its effects. You can still get plastic bags, if you want them, most places but they charge a dime for them and they are of really nice size quality, and even though these are "disposable" they are truly reusable and I (and most people) do reuse them. But cheap attractive reasonably strong and durable square polyester carrying bags are everywhere. $2 gets you a nice carrying bag anywhere you go, and you just keep a few in your car, they are very handy.
Before when bags are "free" they really aren't free as right-wingers love to point out (until not convenient). The cost of the bag comes out of the retailers margin, who is in stiff competition in a very low margin commodity retail business. It is a forced march to the bottom, and that bag will be very flimsy. In recent years many "free" bags fell below the level of even marginal usability. Bags that tear, or need multiple bagging just drives up the waste.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
We did it on a city level, years ago, and it has been great!
The local R's predicted an apocalypse, and also that people would drive to the suburbs to shop so they could get plastic bags. Neither happened. Most people learned to bring shopping bags to the grocery store, and stores learned that the world doesn't end if somebody buys a single item and carries it out the door without a plastic bag.
The streets are cleaner, there is no question about that. In the past, even people who didn't want a plastic bag had a hard time leaving without one. Problem solved. Easy.
Does it go into general revenue? In the UK, shops are required to charge 5p for plastic bags (with a few exceptions) but that money isn't levied as taxation, instead shops are required to donate it to a registered charity of their choice. This removes any profit incentive from both the shops and the government. It took a little while to get used to, but now I carry a reusable bag, which is a lot more robust than a plastic carrier and still going strong after hundreds of uses.
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And there it is, politicians funding their little pork barrel projects.
Or, you know, maybe it's just incentivizing behavior with some harmless service fees that also help serve to cover the negative externalities of paper and/or plastic bags.
Nah. It's just more naked corruption from all those greedy politicians. Good thing there's smart guys like you who REALLY see the truth through the lies.
That's what the local Republicans said here, too, before we passed this at a city level. LOL
We made it illegal to use disposable plastic bags, and legal to give out paper bags, but you're required to charge 5 cents.
See, the money doesn't go to the city. The store keeps the 5 cents. The purpose of the 5 cents to prevent the store from giving it to you unless you wanted it. If the owner of the store hates hippies and doesn't care about the environment, they're still not allowed to give out disposable bags.
The customer won't tolerate being charged for things they didn't want, but if they forgot their reusable bags at home and don't want to buy more, they can still get the paper bag for 5 cents; in which case, they don't care about the 5 cents! It works well at both ends.
The two states that cause the most problems for the US. Fuck 'em.
How so?
By paying more than their fair share of federal taxes, thus funding oppression of red-state farmers who just want the government to keep their damn hands off their crop subsidy checks.
The stories about plastic in the oceans usually fail to mention that it got there because some countries allow plastic in their rivers! For example: Five Asian Countries Dump More Plastic Into Oceans Than Anyone Else Combined: How You Can Help (Apr 21, 2018)
... Revenue: US$ 5.1 billion (2017)"
Banning plastic bags is supported by paper bag manufacturers. Stores in and near Portland, Oregon stopped supplying plastic bags. The underlying reason appeared to be that International Paper (world map) has a plant near Portland. Grocery stores there don't fill the paper bags because the paper bags are fragile, especially when they get wet in the rain.
Paper is FAR more damaging to the environment. First, a huge truck must go to a place where there are trees. The trees are cut and trucked to a processing plant. The plant uses poisonous chemicals to make the paper.
There are MANY examples of paper plant pollution. Here is a Slashdot story: Chile Becomes First Country In Americas To Ban Plastic Bags.
"CMPC is a Chilean pulp and paper company, being one of the biggest in Latin America.
Another plant: CELCO Valdivia Pulp Mill pollution: "The company had been dumping more dioxins and heavy metals than had been approved by the regulating agencies into the river from a waste tube that had been approved by the authorities. It had also been producing far above levels approved in its Environmental Impact Assessment, and was cited for multiple violations of environmental and health laws."
"In July 2007 CELCO agreed to pay CLP$614 millions to Valdivian tourism companies to avoid legal actions for supposed losses of the tourism sector of Valdivia due to contamination of Carlos Anwandter Nature Sanctuary."
"The Secretary of State for the Environment said that, despite having large financial and technical resources, CELCO had an extremely poor environmental record."
We re-use plastic bags to line wastebaskets, and to throw away wet materials. We always throw paper bags away.
Paper buried in trash areas can eventually degrade, but that usually doesn't happen because there is usually not enough oxygen to support the breakdown process. How much oil is used to make plastic?: "Although crude oil is a source of raw material (feedstock) for making plastics, it is not the major source of feedstock for plastics production in the United States."
The natural gas used to make plastic bags is less polluting. Still a problem, but not as much of a problem as using oil.
now I carry a reusable bag, which is a lot more robust than a plastic carrier and still going strong after hundreds of uses.
And how many washes? Reusable bags tend to pick up coliform bacteria rawther quickly.
You are a citizen of your state first, and then of the United States second.
This is how the US was designed, if you don't like what they're doing in a state, you are free to move to a different one, that has laws, taxation and regulations that you agree with....
One size does not fit all, and this is what is great about the US.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That's a common misconception by the left - that the red states oppose anything the left favors out of spite or ignorance. The left advocates a government-centric approach to decision-making. Some government official (elected via what's basically a popularity contest, not an appraisal of competency) decides or appoints people to decide what the population should do.
The red states don't oppose things the left favors per se. They typically favor a market-centric approach. So using your example of incandescent light bulbs, the red states would've preferred CFLs and LEDs compete with incandescents based solely on price. Once their savings in electricity and longevity versus incandescents made them a better buy, then people would've started buying them naturally and incadescents wold phase themselves out. It's pure democracy in action - every individual buyer gets to vote on what type of light bulb they prefer every time they buy one, unlike the statist top-down approach favored by the left. In that respect, the red states will "eventually fall in line". It was never a question of which technology was better long-term. It's a question of which technology is better now and how the transition should proceed.
Likewise, the right has no problem with solar or wind or EVs per se. If they're the better, more cost-effective product, the right will gladly embrace them. They just don't want those things shoved down their throats by government decree - they think every individual should be allowed to decide for themself whether or not to adopt these products.. But the left can't seem to grok this, so they concoct this fantasy where the right oppose anything the left advocates out of spite or ignorance.
Neither method is always right. The market approach can fail in the case of monopolies and certain niche cases summed up by the tragedy of the commons (pollution is the most common example) and the prisoner's dilemma. The government approach fails when the people deciding fail to anticipate unforeseen consequences to their actions (cable and phone monopolies are granted by the government in exchange for things like guarantees to cover low-income areas - arguably the harm of those monopolies far outweighs the good of covering the low income area), or don't adequately search the solution space before mandating a single solution (GSM nearly doomed us because it used TDMA which is horribly inefficient with bandwidth because it assigns a full bandwidth timeslice to users who only need a little or no bandwidth; fortunately the US allowed CDMA to compete and prove itself a superior solution; and eventually GSM adopted CDMA into its spec and modern standards like LTE are based on the orthogonal signaling proven by CDMA).
That's what makes the U.S. approach to government so effective. Tens of thousands of local governments get to try both the regulatory and free market approach. Those who picked one can compare notes with those who picked the other to see who seems to be doing better. If the regulatory approach seems to be working better than the market approach, then numerous states will try adopting it, while others will retain the market approach. And when a clear majority of the states see a benefit to the regulatory approach, then that creates enough political support to pass the regulation on a national level. When you immediately regulate at the national level without sufficient trials at the lower government levels, you short circuit this weeding-out process and could doom us with something like GSM, except we'll never know because you prohibited the alternative before it could ever be tested.
Here in Australia they banned single-use plastic bags (at least most states have now done it) and the supermarkets adapted. They sell a range of reusable bags that are made out of strong material and last for many many uses as well as providing a thicker plastic bag that is thicker than the old bags and reusable multiple times.
So there should be no reason why a ban on single use plastic bags has to be a problem or why supermarkets would have any reason to use paper bags as a substitute for single use plastic bags instead of going with the aforementioned thicker reusable plastic bags.
We re-use plastic bags to line wastebaskets, and to throw away wet materials. We always throw paper bags away.
You don't use paper bags to carry and throw away your recycling? I love doing that.
I can fill a paper bag with cardboard and paper waste, and just chuck the whole thing into the paper recycling container. I can also use it to carry plastic, metal and glass, and after sorting those out into their proper containers, throw the empty paper bags into the paper recycling container. Hands clean, everything recycled.
When I use plastic bags for that, I either have to walk over to the nearest garbage container and throw them away, or carry them back home.
I live in a no-disposable-bag state. And so far, I can count a single-digit number of times that I saw someone who brought his or her own bag. Single-digit. But I see people buying new reusable bags approximately every trip I take to any store. I'm sure there are a few people like you. But there are a lot more people who aren't. And now they're throwing away many times as much plastic.
Oh, please, do tell me, someone who lives in a no-plastic-bag state, what I don't realize about the policy that I live with every day.
Luxury is never having to worry about whether you brought enough bags with you, and whether those extra dollars you have to pay for bags mean that you don't have enough food to get you through the week. These policies are hardest on the working poor. Those people I see buying bags every day? They're not the software engineers. They're the people who clean the software engineers' houses. And for them, these policies are appalling. The left should have had an absolute coronary when the bag bans were proposed, but they were too busy drooling over a fictional belief that these bans will somehow save the planet to notice that their policies have basically turned into a poor tax.
So how many ply are the bags you use for trash? Do you reuse your non-disposable bags as trash bags? Because that's what we used to use for trash bags back before the ban. Now, we have to buy trash bags, and they're a LOT thicker. The people who support these laws simply have no clue how many secondary problems that these bans cause further down the line, particularly for the people who have the least ability to afford them. Thankfully, I don't fall into that category, but I'll still gladly fight for the people who are.
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No his brain works just fine. Humans are naturally arseholes. It's easier to take away that ability than to try and de-arsholeify the human race. Case in point: He made an observation, you replied with an insult. We can fix this by taking away your internet connection thus reducing the amount of shit posted on Slashdot.
Oh, and while most shops do sell thicker plastic bags that you can trade in for a replacement when they wear out, most people here carry their shopping in something a bit more sturdy (fabric, canvas or higher-quality plastic bags).
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