If we give the EU lots of money for each plastic bag – that will make the environment much healthier.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/20/europe-plastic-bag-ban
If we give the EU lots of money for each plastic bag – that will make the environment much healthier.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/20/europe-plastic-bag-ban
and how many plastics companies will go out of business…
..and how many more jobs will be lost
They. Don’t. Care. Ideology trumps reality.
WolframAlpha says EU debt is 6 trillion euros, so plastic bags is an obvious starting point for getting things under control.
They could put a $10 charge on each bag.
Don’t give the Ontario provincial government any more ideas …. it is already 5 cents a bag here!
When I was a kid. The local Certified grocery store would charge people $ .10 for the heavy duty paper shopping bags with the handles.
There was a recent study showing plastic carrying bags are more environmentally friendly than any alternative besides no bags at all. Reusable bags as hazardous to your health unless sterilized between uses and the toxic material in recycled material used to make the bags is also a potential problem.
I miss paper bags, so down with plastic 😛
Use paper bags and chop more trees.
Use cotton bags and reduce land for food.
It’s your choice ladies and gentlemen. 😉
The wife and I walk or take the bus to the market every week or so. We each have a huge JanSport frameless backpack on. We also use those store reusable bags that the eco-wackos encourage. I the last year I read that most of the eco-reusable bags must be used 50 times to make up for the expense of making it which is way higher than the cost to the environment than the one use plastic bags. Here in Sweden they don’t even bag the groceries(I worked as a bagger as a kid and unloaded shopping carts as a kid….) and on top of that they charge a quarter for a single disposable plastic bag. While the study I mentioned stated that most of those eco-reusable bags are crap, break and are not reused by the majority of people anywhere near a fraction of the 50 times to break even I have made an effort to make up for the rest of the population. I have repaired my bags and have been using my little totes(which I always keep in the side pockets of all of our JanSport backpacks) because I will use something until it is on fire and I can no longer stand the heat. Besides that I like my bread and eggs getting home the same way I took it off the shelf.
BTW: I have a few computers here but I generally read and comment on a 1998 Dell Ispiron 7000 laptop running Win98SE with missing keys on a keyboard remapped to Swedish. I am also a touch typeist and incapable of using one hand or one finger hunt and peck, I do not know where the keys are…my fingers do…I still have my dual floppy TRS-80 4p with C compiler from 1983 my dead 300baud500$ modem which I used to get on the Internet back then, various Sparcs, etc and boxes and boxes of V35 and other cables that when I go back to America I am going to blow a gasket when I have to part with them. I will not part with my copy of IBM DOS 1.0 but my business personal computers ran CPM.
Anyone else here a packrat like me who does not have to have the latest and actually takes other peoples cast offs because they feel that is the true way to recycle and to leave the smallest footprint and live life sensibly?
Paul, you really took me back in time on that one! I became “geeky” by being a pack rat. I was just commenting the other day about my fondness for win98se. What a great OS! I used to have lots of old PCs and software. I would have to repair floppy drives just to run some old software. My first Windows was 2.0, and I thought it was a waste of time. Sadly, a house fire took all of the old stuff…….. well, it took all of the stuff I owned. I usually go get the latest and greatest nowadays…….. the PC I’m using now is over a year old and I’m thinking about building me a new one, but I don’t part with my old ones. And sometimes, just for fun, I fire them up, listen to the music I
stoledownloaded from Napster. Or play a game I bought. Or once in a blue moon, have to go find a climate study to shoot some moron down that tries to revise history. I don’t have to do that much anymore, because this site provides much more climate history than I could ever accumulate.Anyway, sorry about how Sweden has become insane about how you take your groceries home. I can’t imagine people obsessing over such ridiculous issues. Do they honestly believe this will make a difference in anything other than add to human misery?
suyts, glad to see someone that has some perspective. Yes, I remember repairing floppies(including 8 inch floppies at the United Nations in NYC). Started out on DEC minis. My RLO2 drives were two removable hard drives in a housing the size of a days of old washing machine. Times have changed.
My life actually hasn’t changed much since retiring in Vermont and moving to Sweden. I always packed my own bags and as then had my own particular way of packing and putting things on the belt in a certain order. Back home in America, I always said thank you but I will pack my groceries myself. I hate waste but back in America, if pressed I would go with paper instead of plastic because I could burn it in the fireplace. 🙂
I am certain we could exchange some great war stories. I remember sitting in downtown Manhattan discussing just how we would incorporate this new thing the WWW that was going to go live in a few years. OMG did that go bigger than we expected We were however, all security freaks and had every socket and port locked down!
Yes Paul, we could probably exchange war stories. And yes, this new fangled WWW thing is bigger than I ever expected. Now, we are considering such fantastic things that its almost beyond comprehension. As far as perspective, I remember teasing my older brother about his very expensive toy that didn’t do anything…… a cassette tape driven pc.
Why don’t they just make everything biodegradable… then everyone could just throw all their trash on the ground. All that compost would be good for the environment.
My wife hand rolls her cigs and when she tosses them on the ground I know they are just as good foe soil as fertilizer as my chewing tobacco. Biodegradable is fine but will the container last until I get home from the market or until the past due date? In commercial applications with biodegradable containers, will that container last until the product degrades and becomes unstable?
I have no problem with biodegradable containers. At this point in my life I really miss the milkman & the sodaman delivering glass bottles that were reused week to week. I do however understand that our disposable society makes my milk & soda cheaper, allowing me to afford them on a regular basis and others less fortunate occasionally.
If you are a history buff I present you with:
a pot to piss
How many human lives would have been lost? How many children would have gone hungry if piss pots were required to be biodegradable?
I am way and beyond the leaders of the CAGW religion and most of its followers in terms of conservation and love of our natural world. My dream is of the good ol’ hundred acer wood, . I would take either Poohs’ or Thoreau’s but these days I have lot’s of time for reading and little need or desire to comment although I think I have blown my self imposed commenting expenditure for the next few weeks.