Maui Bans Plastic Bags
Read the complete story in today’s Honolulu Advertiser. The only bothersome part of this is that the ban won’t take effect until January 11, 2011. The reason given was to give businesses time to use up their plastic bag supplies. Considering the deadly impact that these bags have on our ocean wildlife, perhaps the $200,000 spent annually for a contractor to pick up stray bags blowing around the Central Maui Landfill could be used to buy them up. Or, possibly those merchants still using plastic bags could be enlightened about their danger and they would voluntarily stop handing them out.
They Are Deadly
Ignorant behavior is tolerable until enlightenment occurs; after that it becomes stupidity or selfishness. I can remember a time when cigarette smoking was fashionable and even allowed in hospitals. Everyone had ash trays in their homes, even the rare non-smokers. But once it became known that cigarette smoking and second hand smoke kills, things changed. Imagine a doctor telling a patient, “You have lung cancer and should stop smoking, but go ahead and finish up the carton you have on hand first.”
The yet to be enenlightened will no doubt fight this law as they did the smoking ban. For example, the president of Retail Merchants of Hawaii was quoted as saying, “There is good reason to resist the call for a ban on plastic bags.” She said, “It will have unintended consequences for consumers, including higher costs at the checkout stand as businesses pass along higher shipping costs for bulkier paper bags.” She claimed that it takes seven truckloads of paper bags to carry the same number of plastic bags in a single truckload. I ask, “How much are the lives of our turtles and whales worth?” “Consumer acceptance is another issue,” she said. “It’s going to take quite some time to get everyone to use (reusable bags), and to expect people to leave the house and remember to bring five to six of those bags is just not practical.”
It’s Easy!
I stopped by Foodland on the way home from my walk this morning to buy some fruit juice. I simply purchased a cloth bag. As I did, I shuddered as I watched the checkers stuffing things into plastic bags for the uninformed.
No Need!
Some other justifications offered for continuing the use of plastic were “the ease of carrying leaky plate lunches, dry cleaning, potting soil, hardware items and other goods.” She even said, “People use it to pick up dog poop — what’s your alternative, newspaper? That’s just gross. Plastic bags are very practical in our busy lives.”
I am sensing a big opportunity here for someone to come along with a solution to that problem. Some actually have already. Here’s one bag that feels kind of like plastic, but it is actually made from corn!
Assuming that dog lovers may feel some empathy for other animals, if not the environment itself, I think they will buy in to better solutions once they are made aware of the consequences of the convienece of plastic. There are not very many people fighting for asbestos anymore.
The story said that violators of the bag ban will face administrative fines of up to $1,000. That’s a great deterrant, but let’s hope that the enfocement of the law is done better that the smoking law has been.
