Memo to greens: Maybe grocery bags should be disposable for a reason

Townhall.com ^ | August 17, 2012 | ERIKA JOHNSON

[Kaslin]

From the Property and Environment Research Center, here’s a thought-provoking little vid about why we should all think a little more deeply about the unintended consequences of even our best intentions before we push for government fiat to make them a reality. The environmental movement in particular tends to be a big fan of forcing society to comply with what they deem to be virtuous behavior via government crackdown. The EPA is constantly justifying it’s many regulations by claiming that they’re only safeguarding the public’s health and welfare — for instance, that the costs of their clean-air regulations are trumped by the fact that they could be saving the lives of asthma-prone infants. But if saving lives is our ultimate goal, it looks like the eco-trendy set, in pushing for more plastic grocery-bag bans, may inadvertently be perpetuating a policy that could be causing a rise in food-borne illnesses. Maybe it’s actually a good idea to dispose of the materials with which we transport our raw foods — just something to think about.

Foodborne Illness & Plastic Bag Bans

[Iron Munro]

Save The World

Do Not Use Plastic Bags To Carry These Grocery Items Home

[Uncle Miltie]

Plus, you have to put your garbage in some plastic bag before it goes to your garbage can. Most people re-use their plastic shopping bags for that. If you don’t get plastic shopping bags, you just have to spend money on garbage bags, which cost you extra money.

[marktwain]

Every complex problem has a simple solution ... that is wrong. Simple solutions are attractive because any fool can see what they are supposed to do. It is much more difficult to see the unintended consequences of their implementation.

[Reeses]

id offer an opinion that if you took the environmental costs of producing, vending, washing, etc. the cloth bags the green want us to use, is far greater than that spent producing plastic grocery bags.....just sayin

Cost is a very honest indicator of how much total energy is used. True green costs less, not more. But this isn't really about the environment, it's about leftists trying to force you to buy less stuff. Driving up the cost via government regulation is a brutally effective method.

[a fool in paradise]

Why when my cats catch a mouse I always put them in milk bottles....

>> How do you get the cat through that little hole?

[a fool in paradise]

The plastic grocery bags came about out of recycled plastic milk gallon jugs.

Ecofreaks told us they were better for us than the paper bags. Then they changed their minds.

I use the paper bags for trash at home and carry them to the dumpster. I agree, they should decompose better than plastic.

[dsrtsage]

This made me of littering in general. I am very well traveled. Nobody I have ever known anywhere in the US litters. There are exceptions, people with boats in the south always sink there beer bottles, not because they want to litter, but to eliminate evidence from the boat. I have seen campers here and there ditch beer bottles for the same reason. When I have seen people littering intentionally in the city, it has always been latinos, which may be a cultural thing, as I’ve been many places in Mexico and Central America where the streets looked like landfills. In the US, the more slummy areas in big cities tend to be trash recepticles. Also I remember driving from Louisiana to Texarkana Arkansas, and I remember a wall of garbage starting exactly at the Arkansas state line.