eight-year-old Jessie Marley along with his mom wants shoppers to pay a quarter for every new plastic grocery bag that they use, and is planning to circulate a petition and gather signatures to make it a law.
“One of the goals of the City Council is to make Corvallis more sustainable,” Corvallis Mayor Charlie Tomlinson told his young visitor. And that could include both gentle encouragement and legislative acts, he said after the meeting.
San Francisco recently passed an ordinance to outlaw plastic check out bags in addition to its recent ban on Styrofoam food containers at restaurants.
Marley says he wants to bring attention to how plastic bags effect our environment. "They just don't think about it. Whereas, if there was a tax and you throw a plastic bag out, it would be just like throwing a quarter out and not trying to pick it up." Said Marley
as if groceries are not expensive enough as it is. Imagine paying $.25 per bag tax every time you go shopping. Next, they will be a $.25 tax on paper bags.
While the idea sounds good for the environment, imagine how it would be logistically for the stores to keep track of every bag that a consumer uses.
More than likely, a store may use an algorithm to calculate approximately how many bags are used for groceries.
What the article does not address, is when you pay your extra two or three dollars "bag tax", the bags will still go into the same garbage cans that they go to now, unless, they would be considering some sort of a deposit system similar to the Oregon bottle bill.
{additional source KEZI}--
2 comments:
I think people will stop using plastic if it costs them. They will ask for paper or use cloth ones, which actually a LOT of people do. I use my backpack because I am tired of the mountain of plastic bags in my home. I used them to sort my recycling and hoped they would dispose of it properly.
Most stores have bins in which to place your used plastic bags for recycling, already. I use them.
Much like Trambo's push to ban the bags in Portland, this is a solution in search of a problem.
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