321–330 of 417 posts
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I really don't want to give the city more money. They've already upped income tax, property tax (property values have been going up as well), and they played with the sales tax.
So you're ok with it, if the money just goes to the shop, but they are obligated to ask that minimum price?
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I really don't want to give the city more money. They've already upped income tax, property tax (property values have been going up as well), and they played with the sales tax.
Plastic bags have some externalities relating to how people discard them. Why can't the city tax to help recoup costs?
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Lots of my friends have said the same thing. I've always wondered why people didn't re-use bags before the charge... Saving the environment didn't matter, but 5p does? People didn't know plastic was bad before? They didn't care? It's great that the 5p charge works, but do we need to have a 5p charge on every bit of plastic to drive the point home?
The ideal scenario is to reward customers for being environmentally conscious as oppose to penalising those who aren't. eg. A 5p-off your shopping incentive for every re-used bag. However, sadly I don't think this would work as well currently.
Technically, it does reward folks when they don't take a plastic bag by not charging them. But the goal is to actually discourage people from taking one in the first place, so something that seems like a small penalty does this more effectively. You notice each time you forget to bring a bag with you, unlike the rewards. And it is universal.
Sometimes you want to reward folks, though - this works with plastic and glass recycling here in Norway. I save up most of this stuff at home and take it back to the grocery store, where I get a bit of money for most plastic and aluminum beverage bottles and some glass ones (mostly beer). If there weren't a reward for bringing it back, I'd just stick these in with plastic recycling or regular trash. This adds up so long as I don't take them in one at a time, something I can't get with a reusable plastic bag discount.
> uniform invoices – widely used in Taiwan I wondered what this meant, so I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Invoice_lottery To encourage businesses to report their earnings, Taiwan's tax authorities operate a receipt lottery. Genius.
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Well, if we're guessing, surely developed nations produce an order of magnitude more waste in general. Just like the average American consumers more energy than everyone else.
We don't have to guess, according to this source, 98% of marine litter comes from outside Europe & US [1]. [1] https://www.marinelitterthefacts.com/sources
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It's only theater if you measure by kilograms. If you instead care about "items" or "visual cleanness of the river that all the plastic gets blown into", it's a very different matter.
I'd put the prettiness factor down pretty far in environmental concerns. That is part of the 'theatre' side of the equation in fact?
I hate seeing these extremist bans. I was homeless in California when the bag ban went into effect. Following hot on the heels of the bag ban a hepatitis epidemic broke out in Southern California. I believe these two things are related. I have a permanently compromised immune system. Reusing bags is problematic for me. However, I use grocery bags as trash bags. I almost never buy trash bags. This has basically been t…
I bet a lot of people reusing grocery bags are buying trash bags separately. That was my experience. The free plastic grocery bags were awesome small garbage bags or bags for storage. They always got used. Now that I don't get a free plastic grocery bag, I just buy garbage bags now.
The rescue vehicle was, of course, larger than their track vehicle. You could track its progress coming to them by listening to the trees get knocked over in its path.
Some of the worst fires in US history occurred because of increased vigilance keeping evil humans from doing things like gathering firewood from national forests because we need to protect our forests. The build up of dry underbrush caused by this pro environmental policy led to catastrophic, horrifying fires.
A lot of environmental initiatives work like that. And I get sick of watching it go down like that.
I live in Austin, Texas and we have a ban on single-use plastic bags. People just have to bring reusable bags when they go shopping or pay extra. It did seem to cut down on the number of bags you see littered about.
Enjoy it while you can. The Texas executive branch is trying to reverse that ban, along with every other single-use plastic bag ban imposed at the city level. See https://www.texastribune.org/2018/01/11/texas-plastic-bag-ba... .
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Absolutely. A dishwasher in the average American household, unless they're having massive dinner parties every night, is wanton arrogance. They not only use more resources than handwashing, it also takes longer.
I am happy to report that you are completely wrong about this. The water usage is almost a 10x difference and the power usage of handwashing is 2/3 more: "A European study comparing hand washing to machine dish washing found that hand washers used as much as 27 gallons of water and 2.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy to wash 12 place settings, compared with the 4 gallons and 1.5 kWh used by a hyperefficient dishwasher…