A chance at unbanning your grocery bags

[tjk]

@kootchman: Of course, I didn’t let them in.

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[tjk]

@metrognome: Of course the tax on bags is not burdensome in and of itself but when you look at all the tax increases imposed on city residents during the past year, they are making my fiscal life very difficult. And its evidence of a city leadership that is weak on governance and strong on easy solutions.

Of the major cities on your list………LA, SF, Portland and DC…….only DC has solid job growth and that’s because of the federal gov’t. Taxes upon taxes frequently lead to anemic job growth. I don’t want Seattle going down that path.

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[tjk]

@JoB: The only place where plastic bags are found in any numbers is in the water and could have many sources beyond the city of Seattle. The commercial ships that ply the Puget Sound could well be a major source of the bags found in the Sound and they lie outside the jurisdication of Seattle and even WA state.

On land, I can’t remember the last time I saw a plastic bag lying on the ground.

I think your argument is much ado about nada.

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[tjk]

Bostonman: I am a die hard liberal but oppose this new law. Why? Its more than just about plastic bags. Its about city leadership that panders to its constituents with laws like this one while not doing the heavy lifting where it really matters.

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[JanS]

keetz4..when is the last time you’ve been to a landfill..what do we do when we run out of landfill land? Something to consider. And water is all around us..why can’t we do all that we can to preserve it, even if it’s not in “city limits”. Yes, I suppose it can be voluntary..but…from the responses on here, voluntary ain’t workin’…people don’t like their “convenience” taken away, to the point where they will drive an extra 5 miles to get outside of city limits for it…or they don’t want to look like “bag lady”…like we should care what we look like taking canvas bags to the grocery store. In a perfect world it would be all voluntary, but as long as there are selfish people involved, it will never happen.

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[tjk]

@Kootchman:

This is where you wingers screw things up. You start going into your global warming is a farce rant. In the article you cite, the Dr. Glee who in another article is a geologist doesn’t have the facts to back up his claims……that the planet is cooling. In fact, every year for the past ten global temps have gone up, not down.

My advice, Kootchman, say away from the global warming is a lie crowd. They are outlier scientists ridiculed by their peers.

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[JoB]

Keetz..

i am guessing you just don’t see the bags blowing in the wind . i didn’t either until i decided to stop and pick up every one i saw. once i started looking for them i had to amend my task to picking up those i saw while stopped :(

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[redblack]

rich: the reason you see government as out of control is because the private sector is having a heyday. they do whatever they please, whenever they please – until they get caught – and they have the means to sway public opinion and make average people carry their water.

in other words, your indignance over infringement on your right to free plastic grocery bags happens to align neatly with their desire to sell metric tons of them to retailers.

metrognome: don’t be a sourpuss. sometimes it’s fun to jump in the intellectual pig pen and thrash around in the “mud.” at least you can’t get physically hurt.

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[kootchman]

It was pander legislation.. short, simple sweet.

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[kootchman]

keetz.. this is where you try to browbeat a PC message that doesn’t work. First and factually, surface temp of Mars has risen and fallen in unison with the earth. Now Mars has no atmosphere. Both planets respond to solar radiation in tandem. The strongest correlation of planetary temperatures is the solar cycle… Go figure huh? I was around this rodeo when “all the scientists of any repute”confidently predicted global cooling for the very same reasons. Any dispute was heresay to the left. In the space of 30 years, we have had dire warnings of global cooling, then global warming.

The Medieval Warm Period, which was worldwide, showed a similar, if slighter higher, rise more than a thousand years ago, when CO² levels were lower than now. All the evidence is that these changes are caused by changes in the sun.

I guess these are marginalized scientists too?

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=156783

or these

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/the_farce_of_global_warming.html

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[kootchman]

The more CO2… the greater the biodiversity… 1000 ppm seems to be when we entered the scene, and fruit crops flourished the most…. the biosphere thrives most at those levels.. not the 370 ppm we are now experiencing. See the advantages of C4 plant respiration vs C3 …. in an exploding world population, we actually have a better chance of feeding out planet with more C4 cultivation AND requires less water..expanding the cultivation zone….. that issue will never come up.. it’s not a catchy phrase.. but see what all the agricultural scientists are doing to gene modify C3 plant to C4 plants to feed the world.

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[JoB]

kootchman…

and to whom were the city council pandering?

not to the grocery monopoly who fought this tooth and nail last year.

not to the plastics industry who fought this tooth and nail last year.

not to the voters.. if your bombastic “we voted this down” is correct.

to whom then?

could it be that those free plastic bags are costing the city and it’s citizens far more than they are worth?

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[redblack]

that might be true about CO2 and biodiversity, kootch. but it remains a fact that humans don’t breathe it very well.

nor do we breathe CO or SO2.

your “scientific evidence” is only as good as the species that it serves.

have you ever lived in the northern ohio river valley, otherwise known as the steel valley? back in the ’70’s, when USX was booming, the smell of coke production would make you gag. in the winter, the snow was brown from the amount of crap belched into the air. in comparison, nucor is a daisy farm, and it’s hard for me to think of it as a steel mill.

that’s what under-regulated free market capitalism looks and smells like. look up pictures of pittsburgh before 1980.

now, EPA tried to get the steel industry to clean up their act. what was the response? “oh! those stack scrubbers are too expensive! we have to close our plants!” claimed the government ran them out of business. couldn’t make the investment in a cleaner community. couldn’t hire people to install those scrubbers. couldn’t invest in the country that made them great.

instead, they did the typical libertarian/conservative thing and pissed and moaned those jobs right to china.

i hope your kids don’t get asthma. it’s on a parabolic upward trend. gonna have to face the “facts” then, wontcha? when free market capitalism starts claiming the livelihoods of those you love?

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[kootchman]

CO2 is tasteles, odorless Messr redblack. The steel mills, and other heat producing industrial processes have by-products, such as SO2, arsenic, mercury, cadmium, and fine particulate. None of which are greenhouse gases. What picture did you want me to see? The hundreds of thousands of workers changing shifts? The retail shops, auto dealers, full parking lots? Or.. today’s picture of pigeon poop encrusted rafters, that fly in broken windows, the hulking mills with parking lots empty and weed choked? Scrubbers my friend are not a fixed cost investment..the require ongoing maintenance and replacement. Could it be that US Steel could not meet their labor costs, and the EPA regulations and still show a profit? That’s what happened. Now, if the EPA regs (bty scrubbers do not capture CO2) regs also included no steel shall be imported from mills that do not upgrade to USA environmental standards… that would have been a level playing field. US Steel flat out ran out of capital… because that nasty 1% said no profits, no dividends, no growth…. sorry, no money. Ya know what can replace coking ovens? Natural gas. To meet the EPA standards.. P’burg, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit etc… would have had to replace the open Bessemer furnaces..not just slap on a few scrubbers. The Nucor plant cannot convert ore into steel either.. its an EAF furnace and has to use scrap metal. The yield is less than half of a Bessemer furnace. Those jobs by the way did not go to China… better check your history…..we didn’t have a steel trade agreement with China until the Clinton Administration. they went to South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain…long before China entered the picture.. BTY you being the tariff loving guy you are.. Bush the Elder DID slap a 30% tariff on steel imports. Knowing we would lose in the the courts.. he tried to give steel some breathing room, a chance to find capital, retool, automate, etc..( dumping means selling below actual costs, You can pass along savings) and one month after the tariff… you guessed it… the unions went on strike !!!! Some appreciation, they fought automation, they fought flexible work rules, demanded wage increases, and job security in an industry that where US workers had twice the labor costs of even the European producers.. US Steel did not have the capital to retool to the open oxygen process.. and it died in the free market, because no matter how much a invest.. if your labor costs are double the industry average..you die. … if ya can’t make a commodity as the lowest cost producer … you lose market share. Scrubbers were a tiny, tiny, blip. Almost irrelevant to why Big Steel left. Remember the unions? The ones that went on strike every two years? They killed the steel industry. Given the choice of importing steel, manufactured at a lower price point, because US Mills couldn’t automate and convert to oxygen furnaces with twice the labor costs…investors moved capital to more efficient, yield producing activity.

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[JoB]

kootch..

we are talking plastic bags…

you know, the ones that are given out “for free” by the grocery industry so you won’t worry that you don’t have enough bags to carry all your impulse buys home..

the ones that get beaten up into itty bitty parts in the sound if they aren’t ingested by some marine life first …

the ones that get stuck in the recycling machine if they aren’t bundled and drive up our recycling costs

the ones that will not biodegrade in our oceans or our landfills..

you know.. those bags.

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[Diane]

I absolutely LOVE this post, via a Facebook friend

~

“Checking out at the grocery store recently, the young cashier suggested I should bring my own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. I apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.” The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.” She was right about one thing — our generation didn’t have the green thing in “Our” day. So what did we have back then…? After some reflection and soul-searching on “Our” day here’s what I remembered we did have…. Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles repeatedly. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day. We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day. Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right. We didn’t have the green thing back in our day. Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right. We didn’t have the green thing back then. We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then. Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint. But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then? Please post this on your Facebook profile so another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart-ass young person can add to this.”

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[JoB]

diane..

love it:)

but have to point out that we did too have the green thing back then…

we used net bags and daypacks instead of reusable bags..

but we still bagged our own

at co-ops no less:)

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[Diane]

Puget Sound Business Journal Poll this week:

~

Do you approve of the plastic-bag ban passed in December by the Seattle City Council?

~

Results so far:

Yes 36%

No 57%

I don’t know 3%

I don’t care 4%

Votes Cast: 865

~

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/poll/results/7029311

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[kootchman]

Job… I will take the thread wherever I damn well please. If people want to divert to a critique of the junk science behind plastic bags…it’s part of the discussion. If messer redblack wants to bring in steel mills … that too was a fallacy. That’s our left… if it’s more than two sentences long, and doesn’t involve trying to control someone else’s behavior… thy don’t want it. Put it to a vote again.. and start a recall initiative.

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[kootchman]

Remember.. this is our common denominator … these are our fellows, our citizens, the well educated… how can you possibly hope?

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80691723/

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[datamuse]

Diane, in those days we also had DDT, leaded gasoline, and PCBs. Your point?

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[WorldCitizen]

Anyone care to look at how plastic bag bans have affected other cities with similar bans? What massive outbreaks in E. Coli infections have happened in San Francisco or any other city that was forward enough thinking to enact similar bans already?

And why is this seen as a (primarily) carbon issue? Seems more like a litter issue to me. I mean, I see the carbon argument and happen to agree to some extent, but the more pressing issue seems to be that these things take forever to break down, and in the process become widely scattered across our great land.

Isn’t there a patch of garbage (mainly plastic) in the Pacific twice the size of Texas?

Is the rationelle actually about dog poop, convenience, and people being too lazy or ignorant to wash what they carry their food in?

How can anyone really think banning plastic bags is in any way a bad idea? The city council doing what they please is a separate issue. This idea is actually good…no, it’s great. No need to fight a good idea because it comes from people that may have (in your opinion) abused their power. If you have a beef with the folks behind the curtain, vote them out.

I mean, come on! Plastic bags are good? Seriously?…..Seriously?!? You’ve got to be kidding me!

That’s ridiculous. And you know it.

You must know it.

Please tell me you know it.

Please.

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[redblack]

my point is that kootch throws out the term “junk science” when it suits his needs. kootch, you wouldn’t use that term if it hadn’t been polished and handed to you by corporate america as some kind of anti-eco laissez-faire political brand.

you talk a good game about differences between greenhouse gases and airborne heavy metals… oh, wait. no you don’t.

we can’t breathe those, either.

care to address the human element in industrial pollution? how about the fact that every cubic inch of water in puget sound now contains traces of plastic?

maybe we should just evolve some more, huh?

Could it be that US Steel could not meet their labor costs, and the EPA regulations and still show a profit?

i guess they should have raised their prices to offset the cost of labor – and the cost of compliance, so they didn’t give their labor pools cancer.

and now to diane:

so. you didn’t have the “green thing.”

i agree. there’s a lot of greenwashing going on. big marketing ploy. but in the end, results are all that matter.

so you reused all of those materials. that’s awesome, and your generation and its captains of industry should be commended for their efforts, whether they were intentional or not.

and i think that later generations should buck the throw-away trend and revert to older practices. why not share cars and bicycles, for example? why not allow customers to bring their own refillable containers to the bulk-bin aisles at the grocery stores?

by the way, those practices were upheld because reusing glass milk bottles and cloth diapers saved money for those industries. but today, saving money is not the goal. making money is the goal, and selling rolls of plastic grocery bags makes some salesmen and their distributors money – for the mere sake of making money. no concern for the environment and no concern for cost.

so why not reuse – and wash – cloth grocery bags?

sorry. if you intended to start or end a generational pissing match, you lost.

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[kootchman]

It also includes estrogen..(take that away from the liberal ladies) . and lawn chemicals…check the gonad development of rock fish… ban those! Why do we have a throw away society….jeez could it be the labor costs? Sorting bottles at $10 per hours? ha ha ha… sure. If it was cheaper to reuse glass and santize it.. we would be doing it. In fact, in third world countries… they still do. Uh redblack… the global temperature rising thing.. is pure BS….those weren;t corporate links dude,, those were peer reviewed scientific papers… so you tell me?…Mars and earth had equivalent temperature rises… and the common denominator was? Solar corona activity… that’s corporate science eh? You don;t understand economics my friend… in the face of competition, commodity producers lower costs or go out of business. Ya think HP has security? Go to a soup plant or Proctor and Gamble diaper plant… dude.. that machinery and production has security HP wouldn’t dream of. Saving 2 cents 200 million times is serious money. I happen to have two boats… and ya know what? I have never sucked a plastic bag into an impeller.. not one. They are rare out there… now plastic bottles, 6 pack rings… lots of those. Most plastic is monofilament line and fishnets… I don’t wash em cause I don’t want to… and phosphates from detergents are killlingPuget Sound… oxygen dead zones from algae bloom…ask any fisherman.

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[kootchman]

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