Most Seattle people know that in January 2009, the city-mandated .20 cent customer fee for each plastic bag used at a grocery store will begin. The usual love it/hate it arguments have begun, with some of those who oppose the fee appearing at local grocery stores asking people to sign petitions in opposition of the fee. I don’t know who these people are, and I haven’t looked into that.
What I do know is that one of the arguments against the fee is “poor people can’t afford this fee”. Although I support the fee because it will reduce the amount of plastic bags being put into landfills and polluting the environment, I had to think about this argument, about tight budgets and not enough to go around for many families trying to figure out how many extra dollars it will take to pay the new fees for bags over a month’s grocery trips.
Then I thought, wait just a minute here. This argument is valid, it is a cost that is unfair to put on people who already don’t have enough money to meet their needs.
But the reactions and logic surrounding arguments are not always as valid. One common stream of thinking seems to be:
Poor people cannot afford this fee…therefore the fee is unfair, we should not charge a fee and let’s also keep the plastic bags, free.
First-has anyone said poor people, or consumers in general, have to pay this fee and not get anything for it?
Second-all I’ve heard is the fee on plastic bags, not on paper bags. Do we really need free plastic bags, when it seems there is another viable free option?
Here are my brainstorms:
Grocery stores, who have been happy to pay the cost of billions upon billions of plastic bags in the past in return for massive grocery profits, could credit each plastic bag fee as rebate points, and once consumers had enough plastic bag fee rebate points, they could trade them in for the tough cloth grocery bags that are selling at practically every grocery store now for a dollar each.
By the way, since grocery stores have for years footed the bill for plastic bags, why haven’t they just offered the cloth bags free too? It makes more sense to offer these, a bag that can be used for a very long time, than plastic bags, which can be used once, maybe twice before they are ripped, dirty, or stretched and have to be recycled or thrown away.
Why the $1 or so charge on cloth bags, yet none for plastic until mandated by city government?
Who said that the grocery stores, in order to discourage the plastic bag use they previously encouraged by making it a free supply to shoppers, couldn’t, for some time, offer families 2-5 free cloth grocery bags for every $50, $100, or $200 dollars spent?
It is ultimately the grocery stores who will save by having to pay less to buy huge amounts of plastic bags in the future, because less are being used, right? -And the ones that are being used will be more than payed for by the .20 fee as it stands.
Where is the .20 fee going? I don’t know the answer to this question either, but since it’s a city-mandated fee, it seems like it might be going to the city, and they could offer a lot of free cloth bags to poor families and individuals with the amount of people overall who will be paying this fee.
I like the cloth bags I bought, over time and one at a time, to carry my groceries. Unlike paper or plastic bags, I don’t have to worry about them leaking or ripping and my groceries dropping out. They carry slightly more than paper or plastic, and are sturdy and washable.
I also like the fact that I don’t have to figure out what to do with all those plastic or paper bags from grocery shopping-in the past I’ve recycled them or use them for trash bags, but I like it much better now that I’m contributing that much less to the waste stream, and it’s not much more work for me other than remembering to bring bags when I go to the store.
