In another case of leftist hubris and stupidity, San Francisco is patting itself on the back for being sooooo environmentally conscious. In their latest paean to Greenists everywhere they have banned plastic grocery bags, forcing paper to become the norm in the left coast’s most leftist city.
Have they done the environmentally right thing? Should they be congratulated as the most green of the Greens? Have they saved the planet?
Um, no.
It seems that, as bad as plastic bags are, the paper ones are even worse.
The staff at USA Today gives us some of the facts inPlastic-bag ban full of holes
First the bad about the plastic bags…
The bags’ petroleum-based plastic eventually breaks into tiny particles that contaminate soil and waterways and enter the food chain when animals accidentally ingest them. Thousands of marine animals already die each year from eating bags mistaken for food. Municipalities spend millions of dollars cleaning bags from streets, recycling systems and trees. In South Africa, wind-blown bags are jokingly called the national flower because they sprout everywhere. In the USA, we use 100 billion bags a year.
Oooo. Sounds scary, kids. But, wouldn’t it be better to have paper bags? After all, paper is made of trees. Aren’t trees natural? Wouldn’t a paper thing break down faster than plastic anyways?
Guess not…
Plastic bags cost about a penny each, paper costs about a nickel and compostable bags can run as high as 10 cents each. The California Grocers Association, which lobbied against the ban, doubts this new industry can produce enough of the compostable bags quickly. The bags also must be segregated from regular plastic, making recycling efforts more difficult.
Paper bags, meanwhile, generate 70% more air pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This is because four times as much energy is required to produce paper bags and 85 times as much energy is needed to recycle them. Paper takes up nine times as much space in landfills and doesn’t break down there at a substantially faster rate than plastic does.
Ooopsie. Looks like the Greenwits are again proven to be halfwits.
Yes, once again the conventional “wisdom” of the Greenies makes them look like unthinking, fools. Nice goin’, Greenwits.
USA Today makes another fine point. It is better to focus on anti-littering campaigns to help train people not to throw their plastic bags about the countryside than to get the government involved in banning things they have not taken the time to study the efficacy of the banning of.
But, logical thinking is NOT a thing that occurs very often to a Greenwit because it’s all about feeling good about yourself, not really the environment.
It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings about leftists:
“Modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.” - James Burnham
“Glow” away, San Francisco, glow away.
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8 users commented in " San Francisco’s Plastic Bag Ban as stupid as it sounds… "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackbackthe point is to not use either plastic OR paper single-use bags, but to use and re-use canvas bags or the like. Note what they have done in a small town in Manitoba:
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN0244537820070402
Just don’t end up with a lot of garbage, that’s the idea. How can you be against that?
Sincerely,
Andre
I agree with andre and believe the ban is in place to encourage the use of reusable bags.
I agree with Andre, bring your own bags! Plastic and paper are both bad on different levels, so why not re-use? It’s better for us all.
Search Eastern Garbage Patch on Google and understand where all our plastic goes…it’s sick.
matt
Dang those lefties and their attempts to reduce waste! We desperately need these plastic bags to help maintain our demand for petroleum!
Stupid post. I am willing to bet that many, many people will pay an extra 10 cents for a bioderadable plastic bag. Its not like most people walk out of the store with more than four or five.
In any case, we are way behind on this issue. European supermarkets adopt these policies without being forced to do so.
Also, there are certainly possibilities of giving complying supermarkets tax benefits.
While I applaud the idea of fewer plastic bags floating around, I wonder what people will do about storing fresh vegetables, keeping the newspaper dry on rainy days, lining garbage cans and, oh yes, picking up dog poop. Is this ban just on the grocery bags, or all bags? I for one re-use most of my plastic grocery bags for garbage, etc.
This issue is just absolutely asinine. As one person stated, many of us “re-use” these bags for garbage and trash. So now we will just have to replace these smaller, thinner grocery bags many of us have been using for trash with with even more of the larger, thicker plastic trash bags that you buy in the store. Where is the “efficacy” in this?? Common sense is extremely uncommon with all these jack a– greenwits. The REAL problem is all the dirty, lazy, ignorant slobs in society throwing these bags around and not re-using them.
okayy guys ?
We all know about the 21st centaury pollution crisis and what it is doing to our planet. The definition for pollution is the introduction of harmful substances or products into the environment. One of the major consequences of pollutants is the ozone layer is becoming damaged due to chlorofluorocarbons and nitrogen oxides. Plastic is one of the major toxic pollutants of our time and it causes serious damage to the environment both during its production, transport and disposal. Being a non-biodegradable substance, composed of toxic chemicals, plastic pollutes earth, air and water. However the elimination of plastic bags is not as simple as it seems.
There are many arguments to support the elimination of plastic bags. Plastic is lethal in the marine environment, killing at least one hundred thousand birds, whales, seals and turtles every year. When the animal dies it decomposes and the plastic being non-biodegradable is able to kill again. Plastic bags are also known for killing sea birds. The birds get tangled in the plastic and chock this kills approximately one million birds a year. The plastic bags are found in such large numbers on UK beaches because of their light weight nature they are easily carried by the wind. They often escape from litter bins and landfill sites. The marine environment suffers from plastic more than land because the sea tends to protect the plastic from the ultraviolet light that helps to break it down.
Over time plastic bags break down in to smaller ,more toxic petro-polymes which eventually contaminate soil and water. As a result microscopic particles are able to enter the food chain. Study shows that ocean going vessels dumped eight million pounds of plastic annually. This was the real reason landfills were not overflowing with plastic because most of it had ended up in a ocean-fill.
However an advantage of plastic bags is it supplies many unskilled workers with jobs. The campaign against plastic bags in the west is causing masses job lose in the east. Factories closed in Bangladesh Taiwan, Nepal, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and various other countries. This leaves many unskilled unemployed.
Another reason to disagree with the elimination of plastic bags is that plastic bags give out less pollution than paper bag do in production. Deforestation is a big problem and for making paper bags you need to cut down millions of trees. Plastic bags are stronger and reusable whilst paper bags tend to tear. Another major argument against the elimination of plastic bags is
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