Take a look, especially if you, like me, see more and more plastic bags fouling up our countryside:
TEN CENTS A BAG? THAT'S ABOUT RIGHT.
There’s something ridiculous about the life of a two-handled plastic shopping bag. The 20 minutes it spends cradling your groceries home is bracketed by two vast gulfs of time. First, thousands of years beneath the earth, in a natural-gas deposit, and then, after its conversion to a disposable polyethylene product, a second eternity as all-but-indestructible trash.
Derelict bags flutter from tree branches and power lines; they float in the ocean; they foul beaches and roadsides. If they are not offending the eye they are endangering fish, clogging storm drains or, most likely, bulking up a landfill. Some find brief second lives through reuse, like picking up dog droppings,but those noble detours, too, are short and swift, and end most often in the trash.
The New York City Council has a bill to limit the use of plastic bags. It would charge people a dime for them at retail and grocery stores. The money would go directly to retailers, who would use it to stock paper and reusable bags. The idea is to get New Yorkers to cut back on the 5.2 billion plastic bags they go through each year.
The measure, sponsored by Brad Lander and Margaret Chin, does not ban bags outright, as some cities and states have done. It exempts restaurants (bicycle takeout without plastic bags in New York City is hard to imagine), food pantries, street vendors who sell prepared food and customers using food stamps. This is meant to ease the burden on the poor.
The city should go farther and find a way to rid itself of a bad habit that prizes convenience over litter, wasteful energy use and environmental damage. Until then, 10 cents a bag is a start. The bags are no good. Their use should be curtailed. The bill should pass.
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