Texas. Population size 2nd, density 26th. Size, 1st contiguous, 2nd overall. Export revenue 1st, GDP 2nd.
By population, its 10 biggest cities are:
10. Laredo 241K
9. Plano 269K
8. Corpus Christi 307K
7. Arlington 373K
6. El Paso 665K
5. Fort Worth 758K
4. Austin 820K
3. Dallas 1.2M
2. San Antonio 1.3M
1. Houston 2.1M
Now some may ask what's the point of all that rather meaningless non-contextual information. The question back is, what do you think of when you think of Texas? Trucks, cattle, oil, cowboy boots and cowboy hats perhaps. Quasi economic-social experiments shrouded in environmentalism, perhaps not so much.
Yet an interesting thing has happened in the music college tech capital town that likely doesn't quite fit in with what is the viewpoint
about the place
of many people either in or out of the place . The experiment begins on 1 March 2013.
The Austin City Council passed a law, or a rule, or whatever it is they do there. 1 2 In general, no more cheap disposable "free" plastic bags at the store from the store by the store. With a huge fanfare (of sorts) and a media blitz (so to speak) the idea and the goal is that the costs in space in landfills and reducing the random common detritus will make it all worthwhile, etc, etc.
Saving the environment is just a side benefit supposedly, but it seems like that entire area is more like (say) Silicon Valley or Abuja than it is like (say) Juarez or Gadansk. So saying the environment is a side issue is probably far understating things. Too, they are politicians, so they are instantly guilty unless proven otherwise, as they say.
It probably seems obvious that providing bags to customers has a non zero cost to businesses themselves. The ban covers paper bags too, but those cost more and so have been gotten away from by businesses because of that cost. (And while a duck may get its head and feet intertwined in a plastic bag, paper bags, not so much.) Thus a business case could be made that consumers bringing their own reusable bags, cloth with handles or thick plastic with handles, to the store, saving the store another cost in the cost of doing business.
Certainly it also costs something to dispose of discarded bags that end up in landfills and otherwise, and like any other sort of litter, costs to clean up after too. Well, that's good, isn't it, if you remove that cost?
We might ask if it's government's role to dictate what people can bring home their groceries in or not. Or (since the City of Austin provides the the water, waste water, electricity, garbage, recycling, street cleaning, anti-litter and such) why they couldn't just charge extra on somebody's energy bill specifically for plastic bag anti-liter or what have you. For the first issue, if they passed the law and can enforce it, we could say it's as much government's role as is setting the speeds or fining people for dumping trash. For the second, that's rather silly. If a business is paying (say) three cents a bag, which of course is added to their costs and the customer's price anyway. To then have the people handling the garbage charge another three cents, that's rather a waste compared to a $2 bag that can be used over and over and can hold as much as 2-3 plastic bags. There's the other thing certainly, many people hate "being told what to do". But that happens so much as to be normal.
Then there's the easy fact that most places that use a lot of plastic bags like this have a place to recycle them. Some station in front of the store, et c. Which might also be an easy fact that many people are either too lazy or too stupid to actually recycle theirs, and they just thrown them away or out of the car window like so many breadcrumbs or empty bottles of tequilla.
Also on that front is another thing specific to Austin (and that the city itself is providing garbage and recycling services) is that they have unified recycling. That is, you throw all of your recyclables into a large blue container. It's just like their garbage cans, for a truck to pick up and empty. Which they pick up that large blue container every two weeks for their users. Then other machines sort it all into different recyclables, taking a big pain out of recycling. That is pretty smooth, because many people don't recycle because of having to take plastic, glass, metal, paper and such, and separate them all manually. Unified recycling takes that lazy part out of it, as long as one can get around to putting things inside the large blue container in the first place, and moving it to the curb some twice a month. Not being from there, it's not certain how well it works, but the statistics suggest it works at least as well as anything else ever could. Why not just make sure people recycle the plastic bags there? After all, no method of trying to stop people from being sloppy jerks is 100% effective anyway, so why not go for the bulk that might be persuaded to be good citizens. By asking them as if they were adults rather than passing edicts from on high.
Those sorts of things can be argued about all day with no resolution, but there's a few other issues aside from the mostly economic and often social ones. The issues of what numbers of discarded non-degrading plastic bags do to animals is another problem, but if you're going to use some way of crafting people's behavior, education and fines and a little awareness goes a long way to helping with that sort of thing. The environmental excuses are just meaningless feel-good smoke and mirrors, so we won't bother validating them by seriously considering them as arguments.
Aside from all that, what else.
Most people think of this in terms of the grocery store, and they're probably correct. So, in some places where such "plastic bag bans" have taken place, there's been a rise in illness that has been linked to food items. Seems when (say) chicken juice leaks into a permanent sort of bag, and then later that touches things like tomatoes or beef or bread, things can get contaminated. It seems that the clique running the city isn't filled with total morons; there are plastic bag exceptions (if you will) for meat and dairy and such. So those bags would be separate or they'd be encasing whatever might contaminate other things.
There is a big blind spot here. How big, that remains to be seen. See, a large number of people use plastic bags like these as garbage bags. Without this endless supply of "free" bags each time they buy groceries, consumers will have to buy the ones in the store for that purpose. Right, the substitution factor.
First thing here, by enforcing "no free garbage bags" we have a curious little case of government sponsored.... corporate welfare we might call it for lack of a better phrase. The business saves the cost of buying all the plastic bags as sacks, then makes the money on selling replacements for the carrying aspects, and more money on selling replacements for garbage bags. Win-win.
Let's add another win, in this case the city of Austin gets to keep whatever fees it charges for such things to households (landfill recovery cost or what have you), whatever income there is from fining businesses that ignore the ban, increases the bureaucracy and expands their power while spending the money on advertising it all, and even better, they get to explain it all away as being environmentally and aesthetically conscientious about it all. Let's just call it win-win-win-win shan't we? For everyone by the loser citizen being duped.
That last is not totally serious there, but whatever we want to call it and explain it as, the issue is not as clear cut as it may seem at first. Minor, but somewhat cloudy.
Second thing here is a lot like the first, with some of the other considerations thrown in. If the people that used to just use these sacks later to hold and dispose of garbage, if they instead buy items for holding and disposing of garbage, that means zero fewer "plastic bags in the landfills". Or in other words, there is no net change in the landfill aspect where it involves people who dual-use the plastic grocery sacks. Any savings there is an illusion, akin to saying government programs have been cut when they got a lower increase than usual. (That is, if what's usually a 10% increase in budget that is lowered instead to 3%, that is called a 7% cut, while out in the real world it's actually a 3% increase.)
So there's a grand experiment shaping up in the 4th biggest city in Texas. What will happen when this government-mandated removal of casual and usual plastic and paper grocery sacks are gone and expected to be replaced by cloth or sturdy plastic reusable bags with handles that customers themselves provide.
Or in other words, slow news day.
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