Quote:
Originally Posted by Boquillas
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Second, if you're walking to get your groceries, how does it hurt you to carry a few reusable bags? They fit inside one another (and you're probably not going to carry more than 2-4 full bags home with you anyway) and many snap together or fit over your shoulder, or fold up and fit in your pocket. Plenty of pedestrians do this. Your complaint sounds personal, because this policy doesn't seem to be targeting pedestrians in any way shape or form. "But I use plastic bags, and I'm an eco-conscious pedestrian, so they can't be bad!"
It's not a panacea policy intended to fix all ills. It's one step toward reducing wasteful consumption. Getting gas-guzzlers off the road and encouraging a less car-dependent lifestyle is still a goal. You have falsely painted this as some sort of ridiculous either-or scenario.
People keep forgetting the first of the three Rs is "Reduce!" Then reuse, THEN recycle.
It sounds like you need to be the change you want to see, instead of shoveling the blame everywhere but your own trough.
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I take it you're one of those naive hippies who thinks everyone is some young kid who wears jeans and sneakers everywhere and can carry around extraneous crap on the off chance they need to buy something, or has time to go home and get bags just to get a few groceries. You've got a narrow view of the world then, buddy. Plenty of us real people need to do real work and make real contributions to the world and don't really appreciate being told that small conveniences that make life easier and have very little real impact (I've read the anecdotes and the sob stories and, frankly, they're overblown and compared to other, bigger, more important issues, are NOT where we need to be focusing efforts).
And you're right, is IS personal. VERY PERSONAL, to be told that MY small choices are somehow worse than other peoples large choices. That's bull. You could fit every plastic bag I've ever used in the trunk of a car. I know this because I have about 10 years worth of plastic bags in my kitchen and they take up about the same space as one piece of luggage. Next time I move, if I haven't used them for some other purpose, I will recycle them - many of them are recyclable.
As I commented on another post, charge me for them. Hell, do what states do for aluminum cans, and put a deposit on them. If you put a 5 or 10 cent deposit on them, people would either bring them back, or you'd have an army of children and homeless people picking them up and turning them in to keep them out of landfills and trees. The returns could be recycled or disposed of safely.
I'll take the bags issue as something other than a personal attack when we start charging luxury car owners appropriate taxes. When we start charging appropriate taxes on people who live in extra large houses that require obscene amounts of extra energy to construct and then to cool and/or heat. People who have lawns in desert climates, etc, etc.
Yes, it's not "either-or," but most of those aren't even conveniences - they're luxuries. Luxuries have no real utility. A plastic bag has utility.