Plastic bags make up 50% of beach litter

More litter was left on Britain's beaches in 2003 than in any other year, according to a new survey by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) says a BBC report. Plastic bags made up 50% of the litter found with 5,831 collected. The MCS want a big reduction in the amount of plastic packaging used on items and would like the government to bring in tax on plastic bags. The Australians are achieving a lot even without a tax like the Irish have done. On a voluntary basis they seem to be moving people towards using cloth bags instead. Sadly most of the world still thinks cloth bags are expensive. They aren't. See how affordable they are in my bags section www.badlani.com/bags/

Talk about dumb!

Plastic bags don’t have a very long history. What looked like a miracle of convenience from its conception in 1957 until the late 1990s, has now turned into a monster that threatens life on earth as we know it. Here’s the chronological story of this tragedy unfolding. Who could have imagined this? 1957: The first baggies and sandwich bags on a roll are introduced. 1958: Poly dry cleaning bags compete with traditional brown paper. 1966: Plastic bag use in bread packaging takes over 25 to 30 percent of the market. 1966: Plastic produce bags on a roll are introduced in grocery stores. 1969: The New York City Sanitation Department's "New York City Experiment" demonstrates that plastic refuse bag curbside pickup is cleaner, safer and quieter than metal trash can pick-up, beginning a shift to plastic can liners among consumers. 1974/75:Retailing giants such as Sears, J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, Jordan Marsh, Allied, Federated and Hills make the switch to plastic merchandise bags. 1973: The first commercial system for manufacturing plastic grocery bags becomes operational 1977: The plastic grocery bag is introduced to the supermarket industry as an alternative to paper sacks. 1982: Kroger and Safeway start to replace traditional craft sacks with polyethylene "t-shirt" bags. 1990: The first blue bag recycling program begins with curbside collection.1990: Consumer plastic bag recycling begins through a supermarket collection-site network. 1992: Nearly half of U.S. supermarkets have recycling available for plastic bags. This, as we all know now, is really just whitewash. No one is effectively recycling plastic even today. 1996: Four of five grocery bags used are plastic. 2002: Ireland wakes up to what is happening and puts a tax of 15c (9p) on them. 2003: Consumption in Ireland is down 90%. You'd imagine the world would learn, right? 2004: Nope. We're still dumping plastic bags at the rate of a million bags a minute! Talk about dumb!

Planet Earth's new nemesis?

British shoppers get though eight billion a year, but elsewhere the humble plastic bag has become a menace, with one country even banning them outright. Could the UK follow suit? Supermarket shopping in Ireland is much the same as anywhere in Europe, or indeed the rest of the world. But one element British shoppers would find distinctly foreign is the need to pay for plastic bags at the checkout. Since the beginning of March, supermarkets have been forced to charge shoppers a 15c (9p) tax on each new plastic bag. The idea was introduced as an attempt to curb the litter problem created by so many bags. And anecdotally, at least, it seems to be working. Within a couple of months, shoppers have switched to re-using carrier bags. Customers now routinely turn up "pre-armed" with a clutch of polythene and one of the biggest chains, Superquinn, says the number of bags it distributes has dropped by 97.5%. Now that sounds like something to learn from, right? But no one has. Not one country has followed through on introducing a similar tax. Not one. Britain talks about it every so often (This article appeared on the BBC site on 8th May, 2002!). Scotland discusses it too. India and Bangladesh claim to have banned plastic bags (but hello, I live here and see plastic litter everywhere I look). And the biggest consumer of plastic bags in the world – the USA – continues to pretend that there is no problem at all. Stupid. When there are elegant and affordable options. See http://www.badlani.com/bags/

Some towns in Alaska lead the US in banning plastic bags

Outside the Western Alaska village of Emmonak, white plastic shopping bags used to start appearing 15 miles from town. They blew out of the dump and rolled across the tundra like tumbleweeds. In Galena, they snagged in the trees and drifted into the Yukon River. Outside Kotlik, on the Yukon Delta, bags were found tangled around salmon and seals. No more. All three villages banned the bags. "It's working out good here," said Peter Captain Sr., chief of the tribal council in Galena, where the city banned stores from using plastic bags in 1998. "You used to find plastic bags all over the place, up in the trees. ... But you don't see that now." At least 30 communities statewide have banned plastic bags. They have joined a growing list of places around the world that decided the bags' nuisance outweighs their convenience. Ireland and Taiwan started taxing bags to curtail their use. South Africa banned them completely, as did Bangladesh after devastating floods were attributed to stray plastic bags blocking drains. Great going! Reusable bags are so much more intelligent and affordable. www.badlani.com/bags/

Trash costs Californians hundreds of millions in taxes every year

But strong lobbying from the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc has prevented Californians from being able to introduce a 2 cent tax on plastic bags. Much like the cigarette industry, these guys also obfuscate facts into making their products sound completely virtuous (its not the plastic bags at fault, it’s the way people use them is one of their favorite sayings). Yeesh! Get real. How about this: "Caltrans (the California Department of Transportation) spends $300 million a year on cleaning streets and installing catch basins along highways, while the city of Los Angeles will spend $400 million over the next decade on cleaning up the L.A. River," Murray said. "Trash has become a very expensive matter for our government agencies." They wanted just a 2 cent tax and these guys are helping kill that. A 15 cent tax in Ireland reduced plastic bag consumption by 90% in one year. The savings would be huge. That’s why I love the business I’m in. Every reusable cotton bags we sell www.badlani.com/bags/ helps avoid the use of as many as 500 plastic bags. U.S. consumers use 14 billion plastic bags annually, Murray said, which works out to 425 bags for every American.