18 thoughts on “Plastic Bag Bans”

    1. Not at all politically correct, but when I was working in W. Germany in the late 70’s, plastic store bags were also known as “Turkish Tourister” luggage.

  2. There was a funny NBC news story that said that if you do wash your shopping bags regularly, they get covered in fecal coliform bacteria from your underwear.

    We’re going to have to go back to wicker baskets, or possibly ban shopping altogether and make people pick their own apples off the tree.

    1. Is the wicker baskets thing a joke or is there something antibacterial about wicker I didn’t know about?

      And the way I use *my* underwear, they would *absolutely* get covered in fecal coliform bacteria.

      1. Hrm… Wicker might have some anti-bacterial properties, but only because it’s wood. There was a study of wooden cutting boards a few years ago that found less bacteria on them than were commonly found on the high-density plastic cutting boards, which was opposite of what the researchers had expected. The conclusion is that trees naturally possess a lot of anti-bacterial properties to keep bacteria from eating them.

  3. “It was only about 40 years ago that plastic bags became standard at U.S. grocery stores. This also made them standard in sewers, landfills, rivers and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They clog drains and cause floods, litter landscapes and kill wildlife.”

    Almost every one of these bad outcomes can be avoided if people would just throw the stupid things in the trash when they’re done instead of littering. How about we have a crackdown on littering instead?

  4. I wonder how people in Berkeley would react if they saw someone shopping using a white conical cloth sack that had two eye holes in it? “Well, they banned the plastic bags and this is all I could find.”

  5. I will say, that since the ban here in the SF Bay Area there is a noticeable reduction in plastic bags littering freeways and such. However, this is not to say that other forms of trash are not a blight on most freeways in the Bay Area.

    I’ve always wondered why blue states seem to be covered in trash. When driving through other states such as Utah, there is barely any trash to be seen along highways? Is it that they actually have crews regularly cleaning up track or that the general population is just less likely to litter?

  6. Like curbside recycling, plastic bag bans – and now plastic straw bans – are instances of coercive leftist virtue signalling that are intended more as demonstrations of political power than as actual aids to the environment. It’s battlespace preparation and operant conditioning of the population so that becoming steadily more regimented generates minimum blowback. All part of boiling the frog by degrees.

    1. The researchers who work with sea turtles found one instance of a straw stuck in a turtle’s nose, and the left started criminalizing straws. But the turtle researchers said that balloons were a far worse problem for the turtles. Well, I’ll bet those aren’t really balloons, they are contraceptives being sold and even given away in coastal cities. How unimaginably selfish. They must stop it at once!

    2. I think we should let this go and move on.

      This constant griping about plastic bans is nothing but just another straw-ban argument (ba-doom boom!).

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