Plastic bag manufacturers outspent ($1.4M) those advocating for the ban by 15-to-1, most of it from the American Chemical Council.
20 to 30% of Seattle's shoppers already bring their own bags to the store. But if the fee can't pass in environmentally conscious Seattle, it's hard to see it passing anywhere.
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Reminder: The world uses about 5 trillion plastic bags per year, requiring about 500M barrels of oil, or 2% of world usage.
Don't give up.
ReplyDeleteYou can figure the profit they make from selling the bags (and not collecting the waste) by what they'll spend to protect their market.
But:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89135360
Once there's a patchwork of local regulations, either they pay their Senators and Congressmen to preempt all local laws and regs with a federal Plastic Bag Propagation and Protection statute, or they give up.
Politically this was dumb (I used to live there, and thus not a surprise). In a deep recession they ask for a huge tax? Dumb. 5¢ would likely have passed. 20¢? Dumb. The plastic bag industry isn't full of high-wattage folks either, and giving them this ammunition? Dumb.
ReplyDeleteBest,
D