Prop. 67 continues Sacramento’s war on free plastic bags
“There’s no such thing as a free bag,” Sacramento political guru Steve Maviglio told The Chronicle’s editorial board at a meeting to urge a yes vote on Proposition 67.
The initiative would uphold a state bill to prohibit retailers from giving customers free single-use plastic bags.
Will Sacramento devise a way to charge shoppers who ride on elevators or escalators so that the virtuous folk who take the stairs don’t have to subsidize free-ride slouches?
In the beginning, bag ban supporters said their law would save taxpayers money by eliminating a waste-management scourge — they didn’t seem to notice that plastic bags made up less than 1 percent of California’s waste stream.
The bag-ban folks warn about plastic in the ocean — without informing voters that the overwhelming amount of that plastic doesn’t come from bags.
Because local bag bans allow retailers to sell thicker plastic bags (with five times as much plastic) for a fee, Phil Rozenski of the bag industry told The Chronicle he believes plastic’s share of the waste stream is going up.
The ban includes the usual left-wing politics, with its exemption for participants in the state’s Women, Infants and Children supplemental food program.
[...] Sacramento has no problem sticking it to shoppers.
[...] when there is an opportunity to make those who recycle feel virtuous, it doesn’t matter if the bag ban delivers.
Some day, my many reusable bags will spend their “end of life” — Rozenski’s term — in a government landfill, where they will take up more space than the single-use bags they have replaced.
The bag industry has offered an alternative ballot measure, Proposition 65, to stop “grocery stores from keeping all the money collected from carryout bag taxes as profit instead of helping the environment.”