The Bag Dilemma

Additional Environmental impact of plastic shopping bags

Here are a few more facts why we should get rid of plastic bags.

The raw material of plastic bags is oil. Therefore, the more we use plastic bags, the more we waste oil - a non-renewable energy source.
The petroleum-based plastic bags take decades to break down, so if they are not recycled they litter. It creates visual pollution: in the streets, on the beaches etc. Also, they can clog roadside drains, which could cause street flooding during heavy rainfall.
Plastic bags can be recycled but it rarely happens: according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, only 1% of plastic bags were recycled in 2000, against twenty percent for paper bags.
They endanger wildlife and particularly sea life such as sea turtles and dolphins which can die of entanglement, suffocation, and ingestion because they assume that these bags

source - www.earthday.net

We all know it is hard to make changes but I believe it is in the best interest of all to start making this change for the above reasons alone not to mention all the many other reasons, liter on the roadways and in our beautiful neighborhoods,forest etc. If we cannot make the change our self for the good of others then it is the duty of our leaders to implement a plan to move forward with either charging extra for the bags or having an incentive programs to return the bags, much like the bottle bill. This is for the betterment of our community.

I am not sure what plan would be the best I just know we do need a plan and I believe it would be better sooner rather than later.

I fully support the New Seasons approach. Ban plastic bags in grocers, large retail, and fast food (and any other high volume generators). Charge a flat fee at grocers and large retail for "single" use paper bags ($.50 for 1-3 bags worth of groceries and $1.00 for 4 or more to deal with quantity problem). Let the stores use the proceeds to fund their required Bag Reuse outreach campaigns and in store education efforts. Require all grocers and large retail to sell reusable bags at reasonable (but not inconsequential) prices (they can brand them all they want).

Recognize the beneficial use of some plastic bags (dog poop pickup and trash liners). Those are not part of the problem as they appropriately end up in the landfill.

Find some money to do an initial roll out/campaign, even distribute free bags to every household if you want, educate the public, collect data and refine as you go.

Follow the New Season's lead. They have figured this out already. Put in a contingency component that adds paper if the banning of plastic does not have desired results.

My many cents.

It can't be a very big concern if there is no pick-up of plastic bags by our very own metro. If they were serious at all they would put plastic bags in the yellow recycle bin next to the roll out. Also they don't pick up styrafoam. There are places that want styrafoam so metro could get rid of it if the city were truely concered about saving the planet. I see tons more styrafoam at the beech than I do plastic bags. Also where would you draw the line on plastic bags? would the malls have to charge for them also? drycleaners? deli's? What about the smaller bags in the produce section, meat section....
Why arn't there any recycling cans down town? All I ever see are garbage cans everywhere, full of recycleable plastic bottles, papers, coffee cups....

If the city wishes to include plastic bag pickup in its recycling program, good for it. If stores wish to charge for bags, that is their prerogative. If stores offer a credit (like Winco) for reusing bags, even better. However, for the city to enforce this latest bit of social engineering through a new "tax" is beyond the scope of our elected leaders' authority.

Sam keeps calling these bags a “single use” product. This is totally false and misleading political propaganda. Ninety-five plus percent of the bags in my household that come from grocery stores are re-used a second time around. They are either re-used by people in second hand retail outlets for their customers, or re-used as trash bags. The clear plastic bags are often re-used in storage to keep something clean and the paper bags are re-used to hold recyclable papers. Only if a bag is torn is it not re-usable. If these bags did not come from the grocery store, they would have to be purchased separately thereby increasing the costs of living and doing business in Portland, again falsifying another of Sam’s claims this cockamamie scheme won’t cost Portlanders anything. In addition, there is a potential loss of industry related jobs if the bags are banned or a superfluous charge added.

If there is so much so-called harm being done by grocery stores giving away carry out bags to their customers, then why aren’t the “single use” latte and espresso cups that litter the streets and sidewalks not part of the discussion? And why are all the “single use” cardboard shipping boxes that most large grocery stores receive product in and are simply crushed after emptying also not part of the discussion? The real answer here is that the Mayor elect is a “single purpose” socialist thinking politician whose objective is to strip personal liberties from the public by using “collective” social engineering and excessive taxation to dictate and control lifestyle, housing and transportation choices to the people – Marxism, Leninism and Maoism style all rolled into one.

God I'm grateful to be living in a city where issues like this can be seriously discussed.

Terry, you epitomize the side of America where people have lost site of the common-good and the commonwealth... you know, the concept behind public forests, national parks, public freeways, and the military, etc. (yes, even the military is technically "socialist"). This issue is just an incremental improvement, but it's a step in the right direction. You're right about other disposable packaging, we should do something about those too, but I'm sure your point is that we should instead do nothing at all since this doesn't encompass everything.

As far as using government to "strip personal liberties" through "social engineering", I hope you're saying this from a viewpoint of a libertarian, and not a fundamentalist conservative who would use government to ban those activities who don't see as moral?

How about a cigarette butt tax? I see tons of those laying in the street. The money could be used to pay undocumented workers to go out and pick them up- so much a bushel I would guess. It's one of those jobs Americans won't do
I hear claims that plastic bags kill birds. Have you ever seen a bird eat a plastic bag? I have thrown out white bread for the birds and they won't eat that. I don't think they are going to eat a plastic bag.

It was said that re-using paper and plastic bags can benefit the environment, save energy cost and reduce
toxins.
1. Is it possible to use some kind of credit system to give back to the people who are consistant about reusing their bags. Ex: A credit book whereby they recieve a stamp or sticker for bring their bags back 30 times in a month. Then that voucher can be sent in with their utility bill to get a $1.00 credit off their utility bill or pass the $1.00 credit on to the elderly program for helping when heating costs are too high?
It may seem like a stretch but it is a savings plan.

2.Another plan would be good to implement multi-use bag use in school educational plans. Once the younger people start to understand how easy it is to use a bag again instead of throwing it away , it continues as they become young adults.

Cigarette butts are indeed a serious problem. Every year in Oregon those that throw cigarette butts from car windows cause as many as 800- 900 smaller grass fires as well as some forest fires besides litter all over. There should be a 10cent deposit on each cigarette butt to reduce both fires and litter. A small plastic bag should be included with the cigarette for the return of these butts.

But I'd like laws go much farther in regards to smoking, outlawing the sale of any tobacco device that emits a drug, smoke or fumes that can cause health damage to any nonuser of the product. Smoking emits a drug, nicotine that destroys REM sleep in nonusers and causes nervousness, ear infections, headaches, sinus infections, tongue swelling, or other allergic reactions in nonusers. It can trigger a fatal asthma attack in nonusers. Many children require ear-tube surgery due to serious ear infections caused by secondhand cigarette smoke. One cigarette can damage thousands of gallons of public air with lead, nickel, cadmium and other poisonous toxic substances. Public smoking is a serious unregulated public health risk. The EPA finds that there is no safe level of lead, nickel or cadmium for humans. Cigarette pollution is therefore illegal air pollution and needs to be banned where only tobacco products that do not produce toxic substances that can harm nonusers such as chewing tobacco or nicotine drug substitutes should be the only legally allowed forms of tobacco.

My mother died of respiratory illness due to secondhand smoking from her workplace and required $800 in medicine in order to breathe in her final years due to the COPD she developed from other's deadly drug addiction habit. And even one breath of cigarette smoke makes me very ill and causes me up to three days of respiratory problems and often even doctor's office visits. The smoking of others is a huge medical expense to many nonsmokers. Government needs to crack down hard on this illegal distribution of nicotine drug to unwilling persons through secondhand cigarette smoke. Smoking is a serious unregulated air pollution and unwanted drug distribution problem. Even automobile exhaust is regulated by pollution control devices, DEQ and does not emit a drug in a public place like tobacco smoke products do.

Smoking should certainly be banned in any store parking lot that has a pharmacy because a significant number of persons may have asthma, COPD or respiratory infection sufferers who will frequent that pharmacy. In at least California community smoking has been outlawed in any parking lot of any store with an active pharmacy.

Smoking also encourages loitering, panhandling, drug dealing, prostitution and many other problems by allowing a person a pretense to hang around an area fore an extended time period. Smoking contributes to a loss of productivity and increased absence from work or school as it sickens both users and nonusers and robs society for billions of dollar each year in lost productivity as well as needless medical expenses and even deaths of nonusers by COPD, asthma, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Government needs to really get serious about this serious social problem that hurts our society.

Smokers also make very poor employees in many cases, taking many extra breaks while on the job such as walking off the floor, or in nursing homes, by ignoring patients, or in other jobs by ignoring their work. Smokers also take more sick days off as a whole and drive health insurance costs for everyone.

By comparison plastic bags are a relatively easy enough problem to improve. Some stores like Fred Meyers now feature a plastic bag return recycling box. A small amount of cornstarch will also cause plastic to rapidly biodegrade, and is already in some plastic products. The problem is that Portland is a wet city and paper bags of groceries get wet in Portland rain and will often not even make it back to your car or motorcycle before the paper bag gets soaked and breaks. I've had juice and other items fall out of a wet paper bag in the rain before and not even make it 50 feet outside a store door in the rain. But I've never had that problem with plastic bags, although a handle has torn every so often. Plastic bags are needed in Portland unless someone knows how to stop the rain. I'm sure stores would be willing to recycle bags like Fred Meyer does or some plastic companies add some cornstarch to assist biodegrading. Some companies even have bags that are completely produced from corn as well that biodegrade even faster yet.

God I'm grateful to be living in a city where issues like this can be seriously discussed.

Let's see:
- Sellwood Bridge is falling down
- Schools are getting lousier
- Water/sewer bills are going up 5% a year for the next several years
- We need $450M to fix potholes
- We are paying higher prop taxes for 30+ years to fix the PFDR fund

Yes, plastic bags should be the rallying cry of any great leader.

Here's a solution CoP gets about $30M a year in excess revenue, why not just buy up every plastic bag at $0.05 and destroy them?

Remember just a few years ago, it was save a tree, use plastic.

Now those twits have decided that palstic is evil.

How long before they cbange their minds again.

As usual, Portland is following fools.

I shrugged at the initial post but was appalled by some of the responses!

"Smoking also encourages loitering, panhandling, drug dealing, prostitution and many other problems by allowing a person a pretense to hang around an area fore an extended time period." This sounds like anti-smoker satire, and it deeply bothers me to consider that its author could even possibly be serious. For ANY two social activities, some link or other can be found, but it doesn't infer a correlation, and even if it does, a correlation doesn't prove a causal relationship. By the same logic you use, mini-skirts encourage rape, sidewalks encourage homicide, and, let me see... air encourages terrorism. Please don't link things like this, or at least look up the meaning of "encourage." To the person who first brought up the "cigarette butt tax," I'm afraid there already is one. In fact, there are many. I am not a smoker, myself, but I believe that they are a minority that is trampled constantly, even demonized, without due thought.

Onto the issue of the original post, however, I think that the overall reactions are obnoxiously extreme. There are those (call them socialists -- someone said MAOISTs?!) who believe that the solution they prefer should be enforced economically or legally, or both. This is extreme, unnecessary, and well outside what *should* be the rights of city government. But the finger-pointers from the other side of the fence are equally extreme in their refusal to acknowledge it as an important issue. There are issues filling both sides of the scale, and business and economy (including acceptably low overhead) are as important as the relatively minor impact these bags have on the environment as a whole. Buzzwords aren't necessary either -- tying the incredibly small portion of oil consumption by plastic bag creation to wars in the middle east is as ridiculous as, well, calling liberal socialists Maoists and throwing around hyperbole like "social engineering." Aren't there reasonable compromises here, without all the name calling and "Red vs. Blue" posturing?

City pickup is a good idea, and well within the proper bounds of city government action. So is increased "outreach," probably in the form of signs and notices. A tax is unnecessary, and mandates are way out of line. Can we be rational, please?

Details are entangling this issue as plastics are entangling our oceans. The real issue is what does it take to change behavior. A tax may help this as a burden/incentive while a ban gets straight to the point. Ban the bags, New Seasons has got the right idea.

Are we going to outlaw Tupperware also? It is a lot thicker than a plastic bag and must use a lot more oil to make than a plastic bag

Why can't you just use a cloth bag to take your groceries home in? Plastic bags are a fucking nuisance in our landfills. Oh right, it's cool and tough-guy to say that you don't care about the environment you live in.

Tired of Portland's social engineering?

Want lower prices?

Do what I have started doing, and will do 100% if Sam's tax passes, just drive a few minutes up I205 to a 24 hour full service Wall Mart in Vancouver (no sales tax to Oregonians).

If you live further out there is also one out I84 at Fairview.

If you live in West Portland there is a Costco in Tigard, just off of I5.

These are just three ways to say:

Shove it Sam!!

PS to Sam: with the little Federal financial problem, who is going to pay for your grandiose gift to the streetcar whores who gave you (and your old puppet master, Vera) lots of $$$ to get elected?

Any suggestions as to how dog owners can conveniently clean up after their dogs once plastic bags are banned?

Speaking of social engineering sponsored by Mayor-elect Sam: It's been almost a year since spray paint cans have been locked up at Portland stores. Any statistics on whether or not graffiti has decreased? Has anyone bothered to keep any stats?