Romania’s new bright idea: a plastic bag tax to reduce the usage of plastic bags, in order to protect the environment.
Idea for the “elected few”: plastic bags don’t harm the environment, people who throw them in the field harm the environment.
So what if it takes 100 years to degrade? It’s not as if anyone’s going to plow and cultivate the landfills any time soon.
I was recently thinking about this one…
We’ve had the tax here in Ireland for years now (it’s 22c per bag), and I haven’t found anybody complaining about it. The thing is it has ‘worked’. There are less bags floating around the place. I think it’s more about littering than ‘the environment’. Most of my friends have taken the consequentialist approach with this one.
Unfortunately, there’s a misconception about plastic bags vs. paper bags - the thinking is paper bags are better - however paper bags are coated in some kind of polymer plastic anyway - to make them stronger. Also, it’s a lot better for the environment to transport plastic bags in large quantities to retailers than paper bags - as they are lighter.
The obvious free-market solution is that as we demand a clean evironment (which according to government, we all do), retailers will produce reusable hessian bags to satisfy our bag-lust.
It’s no surprise that it has worked - increase the price of any product and consumption for it will fall, all else being equal. The real question is whether it has done anything whatsoever to help the environment…
-Jon
The reasons you are seeing less plastic bags floating around are simple.
1)The use of quickly-decomposing plastic bags have been heavily subsidized in the past few years. This has more to do with giving a “helping hand” to corn farmer than anything else but so it stands.
2)Same thing as above but with recycled paper bags. This time recycling firms, the large majority of which could not survive without compulsory wast separation, were giving a “helping hand”.
Both types of bags will decade very quickly, particulary in presence of water.