The Wrong Direction

Dear Reader,

As the May issue of the Sustainable Times goes to press, the city of Madison is considering a ban on throwing away clean plastic bags, like the ones you get in grocery stores.

According to an article in the Wisconsin State Journal, the main forces behind the proposal are alderwoman Judy Compton and mayor Dave Cieslewicz, with the presumed consent of the city’s recycling coordinator George Dreckman.

To provide people with an alternative to the regular trash, the city would set up drop-off containers at an estimated installation cost of up to a quarter of a million dollars and operating costs of $24,000 a year.

With all due respect: That is an idiotic idea, even by Madison standards.

There is no doubt that plastic bags are a huge problem. Billions of them are produced every year (mostly made of petroleum) and virtually all of them (minus a tiny percentage that are recycled) end up in landfills or in the environment, creating hazards for wildlife while taking thousands of years to decompose.

By the way: So-called bio-degradable plastic bags don’t bio-degrade packed in landfills; they only do so in “managed” landfills, i.e. composting installations.

According to that same article, George Dreckman estimates that Madison residents use just under 75 million plastic bags a year, but recycle less than 1% of them.

Plastic bags are just as much part of our addiction to oil as are automobiles, but the plastic bag problem is much easier to solve, because viable alternatives exist.

Many commmunities and countries have either banned the use of plastic bags or they put a tax them from the start, so as to discourage their use - quite successfully, as the case of Ireland shows, where their use has dropped by 90% after people had to pay for them. They use reusable bags instead. Easy.

Many grocery stores also have recycling programs for the bags.

Madison’s proposal is not unlike trying to eliminate smoking by telling people that they can light up, but that they aren’t allowed to exhale the smoke.

It is also a slap in the face of all taxpayers who voluntarily don’t use plastic bags: By spending money on recycling stations just for the bags, the city externalizes the cost and forces all taxpayers to help pick up the tab, whether they use plastic bags or not.

That approach is a step in the completely wrong direction. Externalizing costs is what we have to get away from, not encourage.

Yes, we need to get rid of plastic bags. But we should do it by making the users pay for them to help pay for the costs of disposing of them properly, not the community.

For all its propaganda about being ‘green’, Madison falls pitifully short on substance. And now they are off marching in the wrong direction.