Why we should tax disposable bags

Every time I go to a store, I am continually frustrated by the cashiers' failure to respect my decision to carry out the few items I had just purchased sans plastic bag. The struggle usually begins with me saying simply, "No bag." Yet, my pack of pens and small bottle of whatever I needed find themselves quickly at the bottom of a . . . wait a moment . . . plastic bag! So, I then kindly remind the clerk that I want to carry the eighth of a pound of goods I have just bought without the aid of anything but my own hands, at which point I am questioned: "Are you sure? The bag’s free, you know." After being handed my things with the bag despite my protest, I then have to manually remove each item from the bag in order to leave that evil piece of plastic on the counter for the next customer. Then, naturally, the cashier throws it away, because it is "used." AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

The fact of the matter is that the fault of such annoyance does not lie entirely with the cashier. Although his ambivalence toward the environment is not excusable, his insistence to give me a bag stems with the habits of, well, just about everybody. It has become so ingrained in our culture to use plastic (and paper) disposable bags for all our trips to the store that the now growing number of those who choose not to follow this societal pattern throw many employees of our favorite retail behemoths off their rhythms.

This is not to say I am not very excited by many stores' decision to sell/distribute reusable canvas bags. They are now very much in vogue for many (haute coulture for some) but not for enough of us. For the sake of our planet, we need to convince the non-eco-minded to change their bagging habits, as well. And, frankly, selling discounted reusable bags at checkout stands will not accomplish this. Not even the five cents off your bill at Whole Foods will help! We need a negative incentive to fix people's shopping M.O.

So, I turn to Ireland, where they dropped plastic bag use 94% within weeks of instituting a $.33 tax on the pesky things (see NY Times article)! Reusable bag usage suddenly became the complete norm, as if people had been using them for decades. In fact, it is now "socially unacceptable" to be seen with plastic bags at all in Ireland. Imagine that! This is why I suggest a tax on not only plastic but also paper bags. With the availability and affordability of reusable bags what it currently is, there is really no longer an excuse to use anything else, even paper.

How much should the tax be? Who knows? $.33 seems a tad steep, but then again, the problem is a very big one (and big problems require big action). Considering the $4 billion plastic bags cost retailers (according to the Wall Street Journal), we may even ultimately save money. Whatever the tax, I believe it should be an unrounded number (such as six cents or thirteen cents) that requires one to have to either dig out a lot of coins or carry around a lot of change the rest of the day. The key is to make it inconvenient to choose disposable, not necessarily financially prohibitive.

To save our legislators time, they may as well institute a bottled water tax while they are at it (you can read my lamentations on that topic in some of my older posts)!