Uberliberal Seattle’s rejection of the plastic bag tax should give pause to the coercive utopians that have initiated bag tax proposals around the country.
In Washington, D.C., in spite of the poorly written bag tax measure, the D.C. Council recently passed a tax of 5 cents per plastic bag.
Voters in the very blue city of Seattle, which voted for Barack Obama by more than 80 percent, recently demonstrated intellectual honesty when they voted to shoot down a bag tax law, which had been previously passed by their city council.
Estimated to cost each consumer an additional $300 per year, the bag tax would have imposed a significant financial burden at a time when many residents in Seattle and in cities all over the country are already struggling to make ends meet.
Voters realized it was unnecessary and would not provide any benefit to Seattle. Why? Nine out of 10 Seattle residents already recycle and reuse disposable bags. Studies show that the bag tax, much like San Francisco’s plastic bag ban, would have no visible effect on litter, which was not a problem to begin with in the already environmentally friendly Seattle (seattlebagtax.org/california.html).
Additionally, grocery stores, food banks and convenience stores would have had to pay the bag tax, but large stores like Target, Sears, Fred Meyer and Macy’s were exempt.
One would think that policymakers and legislators might have figured out by now that consumers will decide on which kind of shopping bag to use, if any, for their purchases. Instead, bag tax pushers from coast to coast want government to decide what, how and when shopping bags can be used.
When the fabric-feeling, sturdy and reusable plastic shopping bags entered the picture supposedly to conserve paper and plastic, environmentally conscientious shoppers thought that using the sturdy, reusable plastic bags sold by stores for groceries would be the answer.
They are only now realizing that their low-carbon footprint bag is also filled with nasty bacteria if not washed regularly. A recent microbiological study found unacceptably high levels of bacterial yeast, mold and fecal bacteria counts reside in the reusable bags (nastysack.com).
The study found that 64 percent of the reusable bags tested were contaminated with some level of bacteria, and close to 30 percent had elevated bacterial counts higher than what’s considered safe for drinking water. Further, 40 percent of the bags had yeast or mold, and some of the bags had an unacceptable presence of fecal intestinal bacteria when there should have been zero.
Adding irony to insult, San Francisco’s ban on plastic bags has not provided the environmental results it expected. Anticipated environmental gains resulting from the ban were “nonexistent at best,” and the ban likely did more harm than good. Consumers just switched from single plastic to double paper bags; few consumers remembered reusable totes, which caused delays in checkout; and recycling bins were hard to find or nonexistent.
And plastic bags are not made of imported oil; they are made of ethane, which is a waste product extracted from domestically produced natural gas. If the ethane is not used to make plastic, it would need to be burned off, which would produce greenhouse gases. Plastic bags are an excellent use of a waste product.
Katy Grimes is a political analyst and columnist based in Northern California.
