6 ms·

The point is to encourage you to bring your own bag, eliminating a disposable bag from use. To do that you have to charge explicitly for it.

• maxerickson 11y ago
  It's kind of ironic, plastic bags probably have one of the lower environmental impacts of all the things one might find in a grocery store. I mean, most people burn more fuel driving to the store than they use plastic bags in a year (a gallon of gasoline is about 6 pounds), but we don't have a 'combine trips' awareness campaign.
  • nols 11y ago
    It's not just the oil being used, it's the environmental damage from the bags themselves as well. Besides there are incentives in place in many municipalities to encourage car pooling and using lower emissions vehicles (car pool lanes, gas tax, EV subsidies, etc).
  • batmansmk 11y ago
    We are talking about SF and plastic bag. Most of us don't drive in SF...and we do combine trips / car share because Uber/Lyft cost. Financial incentive cannot be ruled out as inefficient that fast imo.
  • krisdol 11y ago
    Germany has been charging for bags at the store for at least 25 years. I don't understand how Americans have so much trouble with the most inconsequential of amenities they are asked to provide the environment.
    • maxerickson 11y ago
      You're shoving words in my mouth. I don't care about bag taxes, I think it's stupid we pay so much attention to them and ignore things that are far more harmful. And we do ignore them, so it's not simply a case of being able to do both, the bags really do seem to be capturing attention from more pressing issues.
      • KirinDave 11y ago
        Why shouldn't we pay attention to them as well as the larger things? Especially in America where the harsh reality is were going to have to change our lifestyles a lot over the next 50 years, boiling the frog is probably the best way to keep everyone calm. I mean, water alone is going to be a major issue for California.
        • maxerickson 11y ago
          I think it is pretty clear that energy is going to get cheaper and cleaner. This helps a lot with household water use (agricultural volumes are still pretty expensive). Figuring out how to make the benefits of the growing economy more widely available seems like a pretty big problem, but I don't think that consumption in the US will have to decrease in any meaningful way.
    • marincounty 11y ago
      It's not being charged for bags. In the states, we just have too many dubious laws. People can't bring in even a small backpack into most stores, without leaving it with the guy would could care less at the front of the store? Most stores are located vechicle distances away from most Americans. It's not the bag, it's a cornucopia of bigger problems, poor planning, stifling regulation only enacted to generate revenue, etc. we are projecting on a bag.
      • smileysteve 11y ago
        Interesting, in Atlanta, I do must of my shopping with a backpack and haven't been asked to leave it at the front of the store or have it checked for years.
        • rjbwork 11y ago
          Ditto. I've been asked to have my receipt and bag inspected before. I politely decline and don't break stride...not like they can do anything but get the police to come harass me, only to find I've done nothing wrong, which police rather dislike - in a 'boy who cried wolf' sense.
  • Joof 11y ago
    I consider it part of implementing a cultural status quo (recycling is good) as opposed to being overly useful. Plastic bags are really in-your-face pollution.
  • nitwit005 11y ago
    The SF ban was motivated partly because the plastic bags were literally clogging the machinery at their processing center. Even with the ban, they have employees scrape the bags off periodically.
  • StillBored 11y ago
    Yah its misguided, I do a fair number of park/etc cleanups. The old school ultra thin bags break down really fast in the environment when exposed to UV. Most of the time, when I tried to pick one up they simply disintegrated into powder. Plastic drink bottles OTOH, those things are everywhere and seem to last forever. Just over the past few years the heavier reusable (mostly plastic) bags are starting to show up everywhere now, and they don't seem to break down as fast. I have yet to see any of them in any state of decomposition.
  • jdblair 11y ago
    Its not about the environmental impact, its about the litter problem.
• SilasX 11y ago
  The point of any Pigovian tax is to discourage its use ... where that use is value-destructive once you account for the externality. So it still doesn't make sense to tax it by more than that value, which the plastic bag tax clearly does. There's a very common misconception that a) product X has a negative externality, therefore b) it must be value destructive on net, therefore c) no one should use it, therefore d) it's good to slap arbitrarily high taxes on X. But b-d) don't necessarily follow from a).
  • Retric 11y ago
    Your assuming a specific value exists for environmental pollution. Instead, by it's vary nature people chose a completly arbitrary value. Abstractly, the environment is clearly worth more than every other thing in the world combined. EX: If 6.9 billion people needed to die to maintain a breathable atmosphere that would be a simple choice. How to messure lower levels of harm is what's subjective. PS: Consider burning fossil fuels has directly lowered the amount of free oxegen in the atmosphere. There is not enough fossils fuel know to exist for this to be a real problem. But in a world where there was it would be a much more direct survival issue.
    • brbsix 11y ago
      If the enviornment kills off 6.9 billion people, that's not much of a choice. If you have a choice, you find another way.
      • Retric 11y ago
        That's rather Magical thinking right there. In some situation those would be your only choices. Hypothetically, you can slightly adjust the comet's orbit and save ~10% of the global population or do nothing. You have 30 seconds to decide and failure to act within 30 seconds kills everyone. The longer you wait the more people die. PS: Sure, your unlikely to be in that situation. But, the earth is a finite system and physics does not care. Or as someone on Easter Island learned you can cut down the last tree.
    • pdonis 11y ago