How The Single-Use Plastics Issue Has Caused Us All To Go A Little Crazy
by Ian Fortey
Listen, we're not here to have a debate about single-use plastics or whether or not you, personally, should use a disposable straw or expect a restaurant to even offer one. But we do know two things: First, pollution is bad. Second, there has to be a better solution to all of this than …
Bags of Shame
We've been shopping with plastic shopping bags since just short of forever, and it's pretty difficult to convince people to use something else. Reusable bags have existed for a while, but they cost more, you have to remember to bring them, and a lot of people just can't be bothered with the whole process. So what's the alternative?
While some businesses have opted for a surcharge of $0.05 per bag, it mostly hasn't mattered. Enter East West Market in Vancouver, British Columbia, where their quest to prevent plastic bag use had them sending their customers down the road of shame.
The locally-focused market didn't actually stop providing the plastic bag option to their customers. Instead, they simply swapped the bags they were using, so customers who chose the single-use option would get one emblazoned with a porn store logo to try to embarrass them into not taking it.
Telegraph
“Ma’am, would you like help to your car with your DELUXE PORNO BAGS?”
They still cost money to make, actually more, thanks to the custom adult video store and wart cream emporium logos, so the store only produced a limited run. We're not sure if it helped, because, you know, they’re still giving people plastic bags. But we do predict some of these will find their way into the hands of some niche collectors via whatever 2087's version of eBay is.
Thwarting Plastic Bag Theft With Security Tags
Over in England, the efforts to reduce plastic bag use met, in an interesting way, with security concerns. You see, when the 5p charge on plastic bags was introduced back in 2015, the supermarket chain Tesco actually experienced a rash in plastic bag thefts, due to their more luxurious 10p bags. In an effort to combat this, they started defending their plastic bags with those obtrusive RF security tags that you often find attached to clothing.
You can buy similar tags all over the internet for around $0.12 a piece. It's not a huge expense, but the employees do have to individually tag the bags. Not to mention the fact that while they might be hard to get off a pair of jeans, we're pretty sure that same level of security doesn't extend to plastic bags, you guys. Those things can’t even hold toilet paper without tearing.
Independent / Mercury News and Press
Still, they must be protected at all costs.
Customers who first saw the bag tags were surprised by them or, in the parlance of the locals, “gobsmacked.” At least one shopper took a picture and posted it on Twitter asking Tesco why they were using the security tags. The supermarket chain replied that it was exactly what you think: To prevent theft.
After some public mockery, the company walked back their policy and admitted that tagging plastic bags with security features was probably a huge mistake. It's not like there's some secret black market for shopping bags or something. That would be ridiculous.
Obtaining Black Market Plastic Bags Through Smuggling
If there's one thing you can definitely count on, it's that if you tell somebody they can't have a thing, they immediately want all of that thing and as quickly as possible. For instance, see the Prohibition Era or literally any dangerous object your kids lay their eyes upon. And that fight is even harder when you're taking away something a person has already had access to.
With alcohol, it makes some kind of sense why people would think it was worth banning, and also why people would say “haha screw that” and build an entire bootleg industry to get around it. But somehow, in a baffling extension of this concept, the same thing has occurred for those precious, non-biodegradable sacks.
Rwanda was one of the very first countries in the world to institute a ban on plastic bags back in 2008. The results have been pretty incredible, as Rwanda is now one of the cleanest countries in all of Africa and the UN has called Kigali the cleanest city on the continent. The plastic bag vacuum that was created was not a happy one, though, and Rwandans started revolting. Or at least smuggling, which they did by going to the Democratic Republic of Congo and loading up on plastic bags that they tape to their bodies and then bring back home to sell. And they make decent money doing it — maybe a week's worth of income at a time. Which is probably why they're willing to risk the fine or jail time if they get caught.
Pixabay
Teddy advises against the jail route.
Kenya instituted a similar approach to dealing with bags and met a similar fate. The country was overrun with so much plastic trash that 50% of the cattle had bags in their stomachs. Smugglers began running the same deal there as well, bringing them in from other countries to meet the underground demand.
Again, for plastic shopping bags.
Straight-Up Bag Rage
Australia began making strides towards banning single-use plastics in 2018, but the process was lacking a bit in what most people would call “success.” You see, in a land where nature itself seems to hate mankind, the plastic bag-deprived Australian shopper was quietly establishing itself as yet another unpredictable threat to the general public that could strike at any moment.
The country's two largest supermarket chains both rolled out bans on plastic at the same time, and the government was going to institute fines of up to $50,000 on any business that kept providing the bags. While this was happening, a union that represented Australian shop assistants checked in with them on how the ban was going, and of the 132 who responded, 57 reported receiving some kind of abuse, including at least one report of a man getting so angry at the lack of bags that he didn’t just throw a fit; he actually tried to choke out a store employee. Imagine being that invested in a bag.
Or a tiara.
The backlash was so severe that one of the retailers, Coles, reversed their decision to charge customers for the bags and just went ahead with giving them out for free again. Of course, then the company was made fun of for reversing their decision, proving once again that nobody is ever truly happy unless everyone is absolutely miserable.
Ban The Ban, Not The Bags
This one gets a little meta. Or stupid. Probably a little of both.
It's one thing to ban plastic bags, another to flat-out ignore that ban, and something else entirely to create an entire black market for them. But it's a completely new level of weird when the government chooses to ban the banning, and that's what has happened in places like Michigan and Florida. Both states have taken issue with the very idea of the bans themselves existing in any way, and legislators are falling over themselves to ban the bans. And of course, in a final twist that either no one saw coming or everyone saw coming, it has evolved into a ban on the banning of bans.
To fully understand what happened in Michigan, we need to go back to 2014 when California became the first state to ban plastic bags. Subsequent statewide bans have been pretty slow to catch on, with Hawaii and New York being the only notable exceptions to hop aboard the “plastic bags are bad” train. But in 2016, Michigan decided to get a little proactive on the whole thing, albeit in a different direction, as they put forth legislation to ban the banning of plastic bags.
It was argued that implementing a ban on plastics would be too hard for businesses to get on board with. The cost would be too great for small businesses, and the bureaucratic snafus associated with such a ban would just take too much time and be too complex for larger businesses. It does seem like that argument could maybe take its own advice toward something less complicated, like maybe just removing a ban or simply not implementing one to begin with, but then again we're not experts on plastic bag banning legislation.
Pixabay
Or plastic bag ban banning legislation.
Fast forward to 2019, and even newer legislation was introduced to ban the ban on banning. At some point, we're pretty sure Larry, Curly, and Moe will come out and just start slapping bags around until they are eradicated from the state and/or reality forever.
This ban on banning bans will obviously have a profound effect across the country if it's passed. Probably? We're not quite sure. We think the plan is to allow the municipalities to have control over whether or not they choose to enact the bans. Which would mean places like Gainesville, Florida can go ahead with their plan to ban the banning of plastic straws.
Presumably. At least if it takes effect before a ban on that ban gets passed.
