(A) The number of major candidates in the mayor’s race, according to Jan Drago.
(B) The number of dollars per hour that the American Chemistry Council is spending between now and the election to defeat Referendum 1, which would uphold the city’s plastic bag tax.
(C) The number of plastic bags, per capita, that Seattle residents throw away each year.
(D) The number of dollars that The Stranger staffers spend on marijuana each week.
Answer’s after the jump.
(C) It’s the average number of plastic bags that each Seattle resident throws away each year, according to city estimates. That translates to 360,000,000 for the whole city. Meanwhile in campaign happenings, Jan Drago released a misleading ad today touting her opposition to the bag tax.
Seeking clarification? The American Chemistry Council will actually be spending $609 dollars per hour* for every hour between now and election day. Oh, and Jan Drago seems to think there are only three “major candidates” in the race. Presumably the answer to (D) is much, much higher.
*This figure is subject to increase if the ACC spends any more money to defeat the referendum.
D is also the first initial of your paper’s most prolific potsmokers.
Number of spurious apostrophes seen in plurals.
I don’t buy it. That would mean every one of us was bringing home over eleven bags a week, each and every week. I go to the grocery store once or twice a week, and each time is three or four bags, tops.
I’m with 3. Not only would it mean each and every one of us is bringing home 11 bags a week, but not a single soul is recycling them. My closet is littered with tiny plastic bags from Safeway, but when the mess is pouring into the hall I bunch a hundred of them up into one bag and throw it in the recycling.
Does that count the ones that eventually get used as garbage or recycling bags? I have a drawer full of those things.
Those numbers are less than what the American Chemistry Council is saying. They say an average Seattleite uses 29 taxable plastic bags a week (and they would know since they sell them).
http://features.csmonitor.com/environmen…
I really can’t understand how so many people in Seattle are against the bag tax. It’s depressing. Just a little bit of progress in our lifetimes is too much to ask?
11 bags a week, just under 2 bags a day? I can believe that.
Sure, the weekly grocery run only produces a half dozen or so bags of groceries, but some of those are double-bagged. Say 8 bags total for your 6 bags of groceries.
And then there’s all the little, one-off trips midweek, for items. It’s easy to imagine 3 more random bags from beer runs, chip runs, and OH NO WE NEED TOILET PAPER runs.
Actually, 11 bags a week sounds kind of *low* – think about how many different circumstances where purchases are tossed into a plastic bag: food to go, convenience store, drug store, produce bags inside of grocery bags… on and on.
Why are people so worked up about this issue? Well, for those of us who’ve traveled to other countries, we’ve seen what a horrible toxic mess these bags are creating on a global level.
Diving in Indonesia… Plastic bags stuck in the reef.
Hiking in Peru… Plastic bags threaded into the soil.
Remote villages in Thailand… surrounded by moats of plastic bags.
So why should we care? After all Seattle is a ‘clean city’ – it’s about doing something on that can send a message, start a movement, continue the momentum. To try and fix this problem that’s choking the planet.