One way to bring down the price of oil is to ban and boycott petroleum based products, San Fran passed a law today that will ban all one-use plastic bags made using petroleum from supermarkets in the next 6 months. They estimate that San Fran alone will save 450,000 gal. of oil annually.
Imagine if every city did this? Why wait for the jerks in Washington to decide for the rest of the country when local government can make that decision? Besides, You have the power the change things better locally and while you're at work, getting paid by the man to change the world, ain't too shabby if you ask me.
So check out this link to learn more and sign the petition for Los Angeles County or create your own petition for your city.
Keep spreading the word and remember to use canvas bags or paper bags when you shop!
Canvas bags are OK but paper replacements are no better than plastic.
Trader Joe's has a better idea; encouraging customers to bring their own bags with various incentives. Even my local big chain supermarket offers 2 cents off your bill for each bag you reuse rather than taking a new one.
reprobate said:
So, we get deforestation instead, not to mention the fuel costs of producing and transporting heavier bags?
Yes, the world is full of crazy paradoxes.
Talking over beers yesterday evening with some folks with European backgrounds, about recycling of all things.
Apparently, when Denmark (I think) had a generous deposit scheme on cans, to encourage them to be recycled, the payment on the returned cans was high enough to encourage production of new empty cans in one of the former Soviet states, which would simply manufacture cheap cans to be taken to Scandinavia to be "returned" for deposit.
It got to the point where Denmark put bar codes on the cans, but these were then included on the cans manufactured outside the country. There was contemplation of installing a computer chip in each Danish can, but I gather sanity prevailed.
A similar story was told, on a smaller scale, about the can-deposit scheme in Adelaide, South Australia (the only such scheme in the country). People are known to fill up cars in Melbourne with empty cans, drive for the best part of a day to Adelaide, pick up the payment, and drive back to Melbourne.
Meanwhile, since there is no recycling plant in Adelaide, the cans are then shipped to -- you guessed it -- Melbourne, to be recycled.
All these resources wasted, in order to save resources.
I wonder if this will create a new alternative to those supermarket club cards in San Francisco.
Stores might sell their own cloth (or whatever material) reusable shopping bags for a cost of say $30.00 or whatever and then give the customer a reduced checkout price/percentage for each bag used.
Incidentally, even doing this on a nationwide basis will have no appreciable effect on gas prices nor US oil consumption rates. Plastic grocery bags make up a tiny percentage of domestic oil consumption.
Stiles said:
Incidentally, even doing this on a nationwide basis will have no appreciable effect on gas prices nor US oil consumption rates. Plastic grocery bags make up a tiny percentage of domestic oil consumption.
Dosen't mean it isn't worth doing, though.
Right. Evaluate its actual merits, as opposed to imaginary ones.
reprobate said:
So, we get deforestation instead, not to mention the fuel costs of producing and transporting heavier bags?
This, to me, seems like the heart of what's wrong with measures like these. Politicians see a hot topic, jump on it, and everyone pats themselves on the back before anyone takes a look at the big picture to see if what they're doing is helpful at all, outside of publicity.
It seems like promoting recycling of plastic bags would be a much more effective and reasonable solution.
DrStinkypants, I'm not sure how it is in MN, but from the three states I've lived in (CA, FL, WA), people generally don't recycle unless it's mandatory. And even then recyclable material gets shoved into the regular trash.
TheGringo said:
DrStinkypants, I'm not sure how it is in MN, but from the three states I've lived in (CA, FL, WA), people generally don't recycle unless it's mandatory. And even then recyclable material gets shoved into the regular trash.
as a native of FL, i will vouch for that. i doubt half the people that live here even know what recycling is.
I think the ban allows supermarkets and pharmacies to use a biodegradable plastic(?) bag made from corn.
It probably tastes delicious with butter.
Problem is, nothing exept food waste degrades much in a modern landfill. There is no sunlight or water and thus even the cheapest acidic newspaper remains intact and readable for decades.
Only bags that end up as litter on the streets degrade.
450,000/year is three ten-thousandths of the annual gasoline consumption of America. If every city of a comparable population to San Francisco (let's say half a million or more in the city limits), that'd lower consumption by one one hundredth of a percent, or the equivalent of everyone using half their usual amount of gas for one day.
If every city over 100,000 did the same thing (and saved the same amount of petroleum), that'd reduce consumption by only eight hundredths of a percent, or the equivalent of everyone skipping an average of four days of driving.
TheGringo said:
DrStinkypants, I'm not sure how it is in MN, but from the three states I've lived in (CA, FL, WA), people generally don't recycle unless it's mandatory. And even then recyclable material gets shoved into the regular trash.
I think it's like that most places. But it doesn't cost everyone as much money to use the resources we already have available (esspecially with a program that has such a low return). Surely some of the money that would be spent on this could be used for education or incentives
There is one about 20 miles south of Panama City Beach. You drive right past it if you take the coast up to PCB. And yeah, the smell feels like actually burns your olfactory system.
What I got from the ban is that they were encouraging supermarkets and pharmacies to use the bags produced by a corn-based process. The article wasn't too detailed so it was difficult to determine a whole lot.
It seemed to me that the larger stores used the "we'll just use paper bags" position as more of a threat than a reality. I could be completely off though.
LexyLou said:
Besides, You have the power the change things better locally and while you're at work, getting paid by the man to change the world, ain't too shabby if you ask me.
Wait, who's getting paid by the man to change the world? I'm confused.
LexyLou said:
Besides, You have the power the change things better locally and while you're at work, getting paid by the man to change the world, ain't too shabby if you ask me.
Wait, who's getting paid by the man to change the world? I'm confused.
I don't know about you, but I'm being paid by the man to buttfuck the world.
No one has bothered to observe that you can't even put most plastics into recycling bins in San Francisco. 2, 4, 5 food containers, basically. Even the lowly Phoenix metro area has broader collection programs. SF doesn't even try. I'm sure there's some sound self-righteous reasoning behind that of course. Anyway.
LexyLou
Los Angeles, CA
January 2006
MAR 28, 2007 04:30 PM