And this helps show making those changes required up front honesty about intentions. People will change even the most entrenched behavior if they trust the change agent doesn't have any secret agenda.

This is great.

As long as wood and paper is shipped around on 18 wheeler trucks that burn oil we still wont be free of the black sticky stuff. You can use zero plastic in your life but all of that sustainably farmed timber that you love to use is still burning oil in shipment and logging.

We are so intertwined with oil that one change like this won't solve the problem but it is a step in the right direction. Lets just be sure we don't assuage our guilt too soon and lose the motivation to make more needed changes.

This "if we can't make small changes, we'll never make the big ones" is completely bogus. Here's a hint: WE'LL NEVER MAKE THE BIG ONES. We've been making "small changes" for forty years, yet consumption is still skyrocketing upwards.

Guess what the OVERALL consumption of oil in Ireland looks like? Skyrocketing upwards (any decrease is caused by the near-collapse of the economy, not bags).

What percentage of the US population has changed its driving habits even slightly as a result of the Gulf oil spill? I'm guessing "zero". Even in Louisiana coastal areas, big trucks and SUVs are everywhere and will continue to be so unless the price changes a lot.

You can pretend that human nature doesn't exist, but you'll always be wrong.

It's not such a small amount when you add the entire country. Like, I switched all my bulbs and started unplugging all my electronics when not in use and damn if I didn't see a whopping decrease in my electric bill. It dropped forty percent! That's a hefty chunk of change when multiplied over a year.

The movement even has a anthem! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCIwnfQeJ…

(if you havent discovered the full love of Tim Minchin yet...please do so)

Packateer, Fnarf, etc.: there's a saying that I love: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the possible. We can't always have it all right now, but we will absolutely never, ever get there if we don't move forward a little bit. We Americans love a grand slam hit way out of the park, but a run scored by advancing one base at a time counts too.

See, told you a ban on plastic bags would work.

Just don't try to pretend a tax on paper and plastic bags is the same thing.

It isn't, it's just a tax on being poor.

In Seattle single use grocery bags have just mutated into the surge of shitty disposable multi use plastic bags.

even SUBWAY sells a reusable plastic bag to carry your sandwiches around in.

I would guess we are using more plastic for the stupid heavier branded bags than we ever did for the thin ones.

@7 - there are other objects made using that distallate, this increases the supply of hydrocarbons for that.

I love those old movies when somebody chewing the scenery gets slapped right out of it. They look shocked, then mad, then relieved.

That's what reading Fnarf's comment above was like for me. Ka-pow! I feel much better now.

Fnarf has a point, but I would take it even further; Given how much will has been directed to the light-bulb changing form of environmentalism in the last twenty years since 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth was first published, and the almost complete absence of effective action to even reduce the rate of increase in fossil fuel consumption, I have come to believe that this sort of well-intentioned environmentalism-through-consumer-choice model is actively counterproductive. People pat themselves on the back for doing the little things that are easy and let themselves off the hook for doing hard things that might make a meaningful difference.

A bag tax might actually be doable, and it might make a small positive difference. But assuming that lots of little, annoying fees and surcharges on personal behavior will generate goodwill when the same people paying an extra five cents per bag can see that the largest polluters in the world are doing nothing to mitigate the massive damage they are doing also might lead many to conclude that they are being nickel-and-dimed to create the appearance of action while the real culprits continue to operate with impunity.

@6, scoring runs a base at a time is great, but that's not what this is. Saving some tiny portion of oil at the same time as one is dramatically increasing one's energy use in other ways is more like this analogy: a guy with a million-dollar mortgage on his house who's lost his job, and is trying to make up the difference by picking up pennies off the sidewalk. Look, I found twenty-three cents today!

In the past decade practically everyone in Ireland went out and bought a BMW X5 SUV. Until their economy crashed, the place was frigging bumper-to-bumper with the damn things. So the fact that they stopped grabbing one or two plastic bags a week really didn't make a whole lot of positive difference -- in fact, there was no positive difference being made. Whoop, whoop.

I call this the "50 things you can do to save the earth" mentality. It's BULLSHIT. We teach it in schools. We don't teach the power usage of different TV technologies, though, or statistics on car ownership and use; nor do we make the structural changes to our cities that enable people to get out of their cars -- almost all of the urban growth in this country is in the car suburbs.

And almost all of the urban growth in the world is in car suburbs in other countries, like China. China's the world's largest car market now, not us. A dozen other countries are right behind, about to hit the magic $5,000 per-capita GDP mark.

So go ahead and stop using your bags. Won't make a peck of difference, but you'll feel better about yourself. And that's the important thing.

There's just no reason for us to be using plastic bags. None. Ban them. Same with oil: ok, not so easy to just ban oil, but every day we continue using it is a day we continue to dig our own grave. Fnarf, you can be as pessimistic as you want about our ability to control our worst excesses, and I'd agree with you that we're probably all fucked, but YOU are part of the problem when you stand in the way of measures to control them. You're no better than Republicans who run on a platform of incompetent government and then proceed to govern according to that philosophy: a self-fulfilling prophet.

Get plastic bags out of production, now. They won't make everyone feel like all our problems are solved, because: look at the Gulf, I don't think people will come to that conclusion - we'll all just forget about the plastic bag "victory" and move on to the next problem, of which, bully for us, we seem to be in no short supply.

Fnarf's right as far as the oil saved angle is concerned, but if anyone can't see the sense in getting rid of plastic bags based on environmental concerns... well, words fail me.

Compact flourescent bulbs (and lithium Prius and laptop batteries) are wholly dependent on limited stocks of heavy metals which are 95% controlled by China. Still feeling "sustainable"?

Of course, most "single use" plastic grocery bags are used more than once, because people carry their groceries home in them and then use them for other things, like picking up after their dogs or for garbage. And since people need plastic bags for those things, if they don't get them free with their groceries, then they'll have to buy them. I seriously doubt this will do much to reduce the number of plastic bags people use, but it will ensure that the ones they do use will only be used once.

I'm against a $.05 tax on single use plastic bags. I think it should be $.50. These things do not biodegrade and end up all over then damn place. If not banning them, tax the hell out of them. I carry reusables around in my oil consuming car trunk.

Why do we use oil for everything? We need to find methods that are less damaging to the environment.

Plastic bags are stupid and useless. There is no reason to use them at all. Every argument against banning them is just a stupid lazy excuse. Ban the fuckers, and fuck you if you disagree with me, ya lazy-minded asshat.

Obviously banning plastic bags isn't going to save the world -- it will be just one less of the many stupid self-defeating things most of us do every day.

Dingo's right, you know.

@20 (and others:) There's one limited resource your arguments are not taking into account: Political will. How many political fights do you have time and energy for in an election cycle? Some number less than "infinity?" Then prioritizing which battles to fight is important. Seattle tried passing a bag tax and voters rejected it, meaning making this happen would take a lot of work.

The question of whether this is the most effective battle to fight at this time is completely valid. And the assumption that additional consumer fees and surcharges increase public goodwill towards environmental causes seems more than a little optimistic.

@18:

Spot on. Almost 100% of the "single use" plastic grocery bags I get are reused -- only the ones that are already torn or have holes aren't.

In Germany there's no particular bag-tax; it is just customary that you have to pay for bags. A medium-strength bag is about 15 cents, a decent one with handles, 25 or 30 cents. As a result most people are habituated to bring fabric bags with them when they shop. This is not some new save-the-Earth fluffy trend; it's been like this for decades. People here hate wasting stuff. Very high deposits on most glass & plastic beverage bottles, too.

To build an addition on my house, I'm only going to use wood that I pilfered from Carkeek park, then dragged home behind my bicycle. That'll show those evil oil companies who's boss.

I bet our initiative would have passed if it had a catchy name like PlasTax.

Of course, most "single use" plastic grocery bags are used more than once, because people carry their groceries home in them and then use them for other things, like picking up after their dogs or for garbage

Have any proof for that? Your anecdotes of dog/cat-owning Seattlites don't count. Most lazy-ass Americans throw their plastic bags in the garbage. Shit, ALL the middle Americans I know don't even recycle, let alone reuse.

They've even raised the tax on our bags recently (up from €0.15/$0.18 to €0.22/$0.27).

We've had this for years, and I've yet to hear a complaint from anyone. Well, I've heard complaints (like the tax on the poor issue) from newspapers and such, but never from an actual consumer.

@27 - Yes, I'm sure "most" of the 552 bags a Californian acquires in a year get used more than once. I use about 3 bags a day myself, so using each one twice adds up.

The only reason this takes any political energy at all is because of people like Fnarf, who insist on making a big deal out of this. It's not. I would like Fnarf and others dragging their feet to start treating this like the drop-in-the-bucket small potatoes they keep insisting it is, and stop resisting it. People picked up dog poop and took out the garbage before free plastic bags; they'll figure out some other way to do it when bags are no longer free. Maybe paying for bags will make people think twice about whether they really need them.

Another step towards socialism taken by the RINO Schwartznager.

Maybe the mother of all earthquakes that would cause California to break off from America would be a good thing. Between this law and the possibility that pot may be legal the embrace of illegals, and the fact that gay marriage was barely defeated, I see very little that's American there.

@30 - I think most white residents south of LA would disagree with you, based on my experience anyway.

@30: http://wadle.co.uk/Cool_story_bro!.jpg
Cob lorry, soot.

I bought a bunch of cotton reusable shopping bags last year when I heard rumor of taxing our shopping bags. I'm really glad I did--they hold more and the handles are long enough to put them over my shoulder. Whether they push this tax through or not, I'm sticking with my cloth bags from now on.

I decided not to buy any store's "branded" bags, not only because they were plastic or vinyl, but because I wanted to be able to use them anywhere. I would feel funny going into one store with another store's bag.

You guys are all off on the wrong tack. Fnarf is right, only in that the amount of oil used to produce plastic bags is microscopic. We shouldn't ban plastic bags to reduce oil consumption (it won't).

We should ban plastic bags because of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Tra…
The Pacific Trash Vortex. Most of which is disposable plastic bags.

First day in industrial chemistry class, the prof held up a ceramic mug, a paper cup, and a styrofoam cup from a coffee shop and asked the students which took the least energy.

The ceramic mug, of course, since you reuse it many times. Nope, said the prof: law requires chipped mugs to be replaced in restaurants, so they have a short service lifetime, and making ceramic takes a *lot* of energy.

OK, the paper cup then, since paper seems more "natural." Nope, said the prof: paper manufacturing requires you to boil a tree down to pulp, in water. Heating water turns out to be a major energy drain in very many industrial chemical processes.

Seriously, we said? The styrofoam cup takes the least energy? Seriously, said the prof: cracking oil to get styrene is reasonably efficient, and the reaction to make polystyrene is spontaneous once started.

I don't worry about using thin sheets of plastic. The amount of material in plastic sheeting is tiny; as a waste product, it's pretty well nontoxic and inert. You're basically taking a mineral out of the ground, making use of it, and putting it back underground.

The guy from The Graduate was right.

Now, _burning_ oil to move cars and airplanes around is a whole 'nother matter. That's so offensively inefficient, when you look at the thermodynamics, such a profligate misuse of a valuable natural resource, that it really makes you want to spit. My prof hated "infernal combustion engines" and wished gas would go up to $4/gal permanently, to make people buy hybrids.

@14 - Fnarf you hack.

The major oil usage is in heating and cooling the food you buy, the buildings they're stored in, and then transporting them.

After you add all the tractors and other equipment at the farm and those used to get the fertilizer to the farm and house/move the pickers who pick it.

(source: Green Business)

@35 - I make mine from penguin laser blasted sorghum wheat.

It toasts nice.

And keeps the mini marshmallows in my hot cocoa crispy.

Besides, CFL are last century's tech - everyone's going LED.

@29,

And still, you refuse to offer proof. Your claims are complete bullshit.

27/39: you have offered no proof to the contrary, just a bunch of strongly worded assertions. It's after all both common knowledge and common sense that people reuse plastic grocery bags. Besides the two uses I mentioned (picking up after their dogs and using them for garbage), people reuse plastic bags in dozens of ways, such as:

* for placing wet items in (like swimsuits)
* for packing shoes
* for carrying stuff
* to hold recycling
* for wrapping paintbrushes
* for wrapping breakable items containing liquids

I could go on.

Ca continues to lead the way.

I saw "canvas" bags labeled "green bag" for sale in a juice bar. The stoner working there was astounded when I showed him the MADE IN PRC label, and that it was made with 20 bags' worth of plastic (not recycled plastic). PRC is a fancy way of saying China, btw. An internet search yields mostly this type of bag, which inevitably ends up being thrown away too.
Plastic grocery bags are US made. They aren't free at all- The cost is calculated into the price of groceries.

I personally like to think that small changes can lead to bigger ones as people see the impact on their own lives. I started with compact fluorescent light bulbs, and saw my electric bill go down and loved the convenience of not having to change light bulbs all the time. Then I started manually adjusting my thermostat, saw how much money I was saving, and bought a programmable thermostat so that I would never forget and could be comfortable when I woke up/got home, and then got a heated mattress pad because I could save even more and realized I was breathing and sleeping more comfortably with the thermostat very low at night. Then I realized what a big waste of money swiffers, paper towels, and napkins were and invested in a few microfiber cloths and cloth napkins, making back their cost on one large pack of paper towels. Add onto that living in the city and driving less than 2000 miles a year (yes, yes, I don't need the car, but I already owned it, and it's not worth much, so it'll go when it dies, and I typically make sure to carpool for the trips I do drive, like to the awesome grocery store that would be a really long commute on the weekend), choosing a walkable community so I don't even have to take public transport for basic tasks, purchasing an energy-star home (all appliances, windows, and doors, plus low-flow water fixtures), joining a farm share, growing a number of my own vegetables, etc...basically, it really sunk in as I saw the improvements to my finances and quality of life. Plus, I've gotten my family on board, with frequent phone calls about where to get the right light bulbs and what furnace to purchase and how to best batch-cook to cut energy use and have meals ready-to-go, etc. I was especially impressed when my mom asked for a programmable thermostat for Christmas, and after I installed it, bragged to everyone who would hear her about how the gas company came to check her meter because they thought it was broken. Seeing that you have money to save, or spend on other things, because your energy/disposables/transportation bills are half of what other people pay is contagious!

@25 - FTW!

Here some stores make you pay for all plastic bags, and some only for large and thick ones.

I think the oil-saving argument is pretty dumb. It really is comparable to someone who's deep in debt thinking that giving up chewing gum will somehow help.

However, there's also the marine life problem, which is really a recycling problem.

Haven't read all the comments on this thread yet, but have been using canvas bags regularly for some time now. They're cheap (anywhere from $0.50 to $0.90 apiece) so you can stock up on several of them, and keep them handy in your car, office, home, whatever.

It took some time trying to remember to have a canvas bag available whenever I went shopping, but like they say, do something 20 times and it becomes a habit, and it did.

Now, I don't even use plastic when in the produce section. I simply put the veggies in my cart, free-range if you will, and they get thrown in the canvas bag when sacked by the clerk.

In doing so, I've almost completely eliminated using any type of plastic grocery bags. And, a couple of the grocery stores I shop at give a $0.05 credit when using my own canvas bags. Over a year's time, it does add up.

It doesn't matter how many times they get reused, they should not exist in the first place.

47: of course it matters. They're less environmentally destructive to produce and transport than paper bags, they last longer, and they're fully recyclable.

I've visited Ireland many times, and the change between before and after the PlasTax law was passed is STUNNING. In the 80s and 90s there were plastic bags everywhere, and you'd find dead seagulls with the bags wrapped around their necks on the beach. Beginning in about 2004 and continuing until now, you just stopped seeing the bags at all. I just spent five weeks there and -- although there's still other kinds of litter -- there wasn't a plastic bag to be seen by the side of the road, on a beach, or in the fields. They're gone. Everyone uses reusable bags or boxes now because it's the normal thing to do.

I do think we're making progress ,and this is one more small step toward that end. Fifty years ago 99.9% of us didn't know how badly we were abusing our earth. Now you'd have to live on another planet not to know we need to make some changes. Twenty years ago we weren't recycling like we are now. Were're learning how to make different choices and, yes there are fewer SUVs on the road.These are certainly not the only changes we need to make, but our great minds in the field of saving our planet are making us more aware of what we need to do every day. It's just a matter of being aware. Certainly there will always be people who don't participate because it's not enough (they can't be bothered) but it will help. The best thing we have going for us is that our children are being taught from birth that we need to be better housekeepers (or should I say better earthkeepers?) They are our future, and are already aware that we need solutions to some very serious problems. Many will feel compelled to rise to the occasion when thinking about their education and their lifes' work. I'm optimistic that reuseable bags are one more step in our long journey towards a btter life.