Kudos to the City Council of San Jose for banning plastic bags! And kudos to the city's Environmental Services and Planning Divisions for their comprehensive two-year study of the environmental impacts of single-use plastic bags and the best way to craft an ordinance which bans them without negative impacts on our community.
The City Council meeting yesterday, Dec 14th, 2010, was more inspiring than city council meetings tend to be. I don't have the exact count but it seemed that 60 people showed up to speak their mind, most in favor of the ban, but a handful against it, most notably the "plastic bag monster" (see picture).
I've spent time over the last few days reading the concerns that have been posted underneath news articles about the city's ordinance, and many of these concerns seem to be posted by citizens who are worried about the many secondary uses for which they currently use these bags once they get home with their groceries, such as lining their trash cans and cleaning up after their pets. What will they do now that their "free" source of plastic bags goes away? [Of course, I put the "free" in quotes because we are paying A LOT for these bags both at the store and in the costs of environmental cleanup and hauling].
A quick google search will reveal all the painful statistics about how much these bags really cost us, both fiscally and environmentally, and while these facts are important, I won't go into that here.
Did you know that the single use shopping bag was invented in the 1960's by a Swedish engineer? Did you know that these bags only came into widespread use in 1982, when the large grocery chains Safeway and Kroger started replacing paper bags with more affordable plastic bags. That is less than 30 years ago!!!
I assure you, in case you doubt it, that we've had groceries, and trash cans, and pet waste for way longer than 30 years! And somehow we managed to deal with them without plastic bags!
Let's face it, plastic bags are a bad habit. We've simply gotten accustomed to using something that is just plain bad for us, bad for the environment, bad for wildlife and sea creatures and ultimately bad for our pocketbooks. I would contend that we can all re-learn the ways we somehow used to function before single-use plastic bags were even an option in our lives!
