Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Article: "No Paper Or Plastic?"

The link: http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/09/07/no-paper-or-plastic-la-shoppers-wary-of-proposed-nightmare-ban/

" LOS ANGELES (CBS) — An effort to allow only reusable bags at Los Angeles grocery stores may sound like a political long-shot, but one city councilman thinks the public will eventually warm up to the initiative. "

I'm of two minds about this. First, I honestly don't think an outright ban is a good idea. I honestly don't think it'll fly.

Secondly, there is another way to achieve the same results.

What they're trying to do, obviously, is to reduce (and/or eliminate) the number of plastic and paper bags that make it into the landfill, as quite a bit of trash that makes it there are those bags.

Wal-Mart does things a different way. They have a receptacle inside (in my local store) it's near the Customer Service Desk where you can leave their plastic bags. These bags are then recycled and don't make it to the landfill.

Perhaps LA could try something like that, with some sort of incentive? Something like a percentage discount applied to your next shopping purchase?

The scenario would go something like this:

You save the plastic bags from your shopping trips and then, when you have enough of them, you take them to the store to be recycled. The associate at the Service Desk would then give you a receipt for your bags where the amount of the rebate would depend on the number of bags you'd brought back. (Obviously, you wouldn't want to count the things, so they could be weighed.)

You do your shopping as usual and at the checkout, you present the receipt you'd gotten earlier to the associate at the checkout who then deducts the amount on the receipt from the bill.

Obviously, there would be bugs and snafus to be worked out. But in theory, it could work.

In order that I don't have to type the entire thing out again, here's what I wrote about it some time back: (well, the link to it anyway) http://gregb1967.blogspot.com/2009/06/i-think-im-going-to-shock-somebody.html

If you think that this doesn't affect you, you might wish to consider this: " These toxin-containing plastic pieces are also eaten by jellyfish, which are then eaten by larger fish. Many of these fish are then consumed by humans, resulting in their ingestion of toxic chemicals.[32] Marine plastics also facilitate the spread of invasive species that attach to floating plastic in one region and drift long distances to colonize other ecosystems.[15] " (Links are Wikipedia's and are left intact. Emphasis added.)

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