The anti-plastic bag hysteria is spreading, with the self-important Los Angeles City Council now voting 11-1 to ban them.
Under the ban, stores that sell perishable foods will be prohibited from handing out plastic grocery bags.
“We’ve seen plastic bags clogging our gutters, polluting our rivers and piling up on our beaches,” Councilmember José Huizar said in a statement. “The time for the City of Los Angeles to take action to protect our environment is now. And every big city in the nation can follow our lead.”
Nearly two billion single-use plastic bags and 400 million paper bags are distributed annually in Los Angeles, according Health the Bay, a non-profit environmental organization.
If the ban is violated, stores will be fined an unspecified amount.
The law also calls for a 10-cent charge per paper bag.
“By 2014, more than one-third of Californians — 13 million people — will live in communities that no longer have to deal with the scourge and cost of single use plastic grocery bags,” Mark Murray, Executive Director of Californians Against Waste, said in a statement.
Scourge?
I for one love plastic bags and consider these bans a scourge, as they will only make my life more inconvenient. Paper bags suck — not only because they are not designed to be carried any distance with one hand, but because they kill trees, while plastic is an extremely inexpensive byproduct of the petroleum industry. Plus, as a dog owner I save my plastic bags and use them to pick up dog poop, so I don’t consider them to be “single use.”
I’m curious about one thing, though, and that is whether the bags are banned as a product, or only as a freebie to customers. Because I wouldn’t especially mind buying them in bulk if I had to, and just pulling them out and stuffing my groceries into them. I don’t see how they can stop people from using plastic bags.
Or can they? The liberal fascists have no sense of limits on what they can and cannot regulate. They never stop butting into everyone’s business, and there is nothing liberal about them. Every day I read about another petty tyranny, and this is only the latest.
As to the cloth shopping bags the liberals want to inflict on everyone, they really are a scourge. Not only are they are more labor intensive, but they load up with food bacteria, so unless you want to get sick, you will have to waste plenty of precious water washing them regularly:
A reminder to shoppers who use reusable grocery bags: Don’t forget to wash them after you’ve emptied them.
Nearly every bag examined for bacteria by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University found whopping amounts of bugs. Coliform bacteria, suggesting raw-meat or uncooked-food contamination, was in half of the bags, and E. coli was found in 12 percent of the bags.
Running the bags through a washer or cleaning them by hand reduced bacteria levels to almost nothing, the study reported, but nearly all shoppers questioned said they do not regularly, if ever, wash their reusable bags. About a third said they also used their food-shopping bags to haul around non-food items.
But never mind any of that! Liberals are at war with plastic bags, mainly because they get to feel good about themselves while telling people what to do.
So, expect this obnoxious idea to spread. If more people contract and spread E. coli, so much the better.
Meddlesome puritanical pigs.
Comments
12 responses to “The scourge urge”
It’s times like these I channel Archie Bunker:
{AB}
Would you feel better, little girl, if there was paper bags clogging up the gutters?
{/AB}
One of my buttons is the concept of tree killer. Which would be fair, if consumers of bread were known as wheat killers. And, follow thus; potato killer, lettuce killer, tomato killer, etc.
Young trees are huge oxygen engines, and trees mean paying jobs for men willing to work the woods.
All we need to, I guess, is figure out where young trees come from.
.
I remember, not so long ago, that the same do-gooders in California forced us to use plastic bags because paper bags were bad for the environment.
I just e-mailed my councilman thanking him for his yes vote. There will still be plastic bags for produce, etc., so you can use those for your puppies,
Erm. Do you mean to say that people who use the cloth bags are not putting their produce into those nice little tear-off plastic bags that protect that produce from the cloth bags?
I think I may have a chat with the Darwin Awards group.
Actually,I reuse the plastic net bags over and over. I even made cloth produce bags out of cloth remnants. It can be done.
Jenny,
Hope you’re bleaching those produce bags after every use. E.Coli, you know.
Too bad for all the fish killed by the effluent from your bleach wash.
I still have a few plastic bags from before the ban went into effect here in Austin, TX. I use these for milk and meats in my reusable bags. I am not sure, but I don’t think that the reusable bags I am using are actually cloth…but a non-woven polyester-type…i.e. plastic!
Neil,
Nope, no bleach. I wash the bags when they get dirty (I use soap nuts and recycle the water)and so far (several years), no illness, no death.
THIS IS NOT TRICKY, FOLKS. Even my husband uses these bags, and he is totally on your side.
Jenny,
You’ve been lucky.
That is all.
I prefer stainless steel bags. You can heat them to 2,200 F and kill most bacteria.
They are heavy and expensive. You HAVE to reuse them.
Some church groups cut plastic bags into strips/ tie them together to form long strips then crochet mats for people in third world countries to lay on.
You can make rugs out of them for your home also. You might be surprised at how many it takes.
Just saying.