NYT 5th May - GREAT editorial!!

I've just returned from a delightful walk around the nearby lake...........it was such a delight to see the duck and other birds splashing around in the water. But.........the litter (mainly from those who fish and leave their junk behind when they've finished and gone home) was a disappointment, visually and environmentally..............

When I got home and opened the NYT, the following article brought a smile to my lips.......a very timely and relevant article close to my heart!!

NYT

The two-handled plastic shopping bag, cheap, strong, portable, almost feather-light, does its one job extraordinarily well.

It’s what it does afterward that is the problem. Having sheltered some purchase on a short, one-way trip home by car, subway or along a sidewalk, it is often abandoned to the wind. There it begins a new, practically eternal afterlife as a polluting nuisance. Bags roost tenaciously in trees, draping branches until they shred like ugly urban Spanish moss. They choke sewer drains and waterways, or they just roll around on the streets: tumbleweeds from some petroleum-based hellscape.

Plastic is ineradicable in modern society, but that is no reason not to try to limit the wastefulness and blight from its overuse. Thanks to determined efforts by environmentally minded advocates and politicians, like the New York City Council member Brad Lander, the city is poised to join the growing roster of places that have taken on the bane of plastic shopping bags.

The Council is to vote this week on a bill to impose a nickel fee on single-use bags at convenience, grocery and other stores. The fee applies to both plastic and paper, and is intended to discourage the use of disposable bags in favor of bags that are sturdier, environmentally friendlier and reusable.

The bill’s supporters, a group that now includes the Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, say the benefits of a cleaner city outweigh what they consider a relatively modest expense and inconvenience for shoppers. They cite the millions of dollars the city spends to send plastic bags to landfills, and the problems the bags cause by clogging recycling equipment.

Advocates for the poor have long resisted various cities’ efforts to crack down on bags — whether by charging fees or banning them — as a regressive tax on shoppers who can’t afford to be nickel-and-dimed every time they get groceries. The Council says the nickel fee is a compromise that tries to hit a sweet spot — less drastic than an outright ban, and half of the 10 cents that sponsors had originally sought, while still likely to sharply reduce the bags’ use. The fee, which retailers will collect and keep (it is not a tax, and so avoids the need for a government collection and enforcement effort), does not apply in transactions involving food stamps, as well as food pantries and other emergency food providers, and restaurants.

The bill’s reasoning, and its sensible exemptions, are on target. And its goal — a city less blighted by rustling blossoms of abandoned plastic — could not be nobler.