Poor Us. Turns out we have Eco-amnesia!
Think that Americans are losing all their constitutional rights? It might be worse than that. We might be losing our minds as well. According to an article in Grist by Terry Tamminen ("Eco-amnesia costs the US $20 billion a year") "as California stands ready this week to pass a law that would ban the distribution of wasteful single-use plastic bags, the opponents of the bill are certain it will doom consumers because, they insist, it is so hard to remember to bring reusable bags when we go shopping. Is such a clever, creative species really that forgetful or is this a symptom of some kind of eco-amnesia and therefore not our fault?"
Turns out that not only do we forget to bring our reusable bags but as usual we Americans forget the crucial difference between "price" and "cost." The plastic bags may come at a "free price" but the "cost" is much greater. Tamminen writes: "Retailers in the U.S., they say, spend $4 billion a year on these plastic bags, a cost which certainly is passed onto customers. And the total cost of collecting plastic litter in the U.S. each year, including a lot of these disposable bags, is estimated at another $11.5 billion.
We use about 38 million barrels of oil to make those bags each year -- roughly 10 times the volume of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. At $70 per barrel, that’s $2.7 billion in raw material costs alone. Taken together, the U.S. spends close to $20 billion every year on a product we think of as 'free' and 'disposable.'"
And that's not the only cost involved. Tamminen doesn't even take on the cost to our environment (that's right, I said our. We all live here and it belongs to all of us, not just environmentalists.) Of the 60,000 plastic bags are discarded in the US every 5 seconds (www.saveourshores.org) much of those are not actually recycled or sent to the landfill. Many of them are allowed to roam free, reeking havoc doing everything from clogging up city sewers and stormdrains to wrapping themselves around marine animals and strangling them. There is at least one "island" of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean that is estimated to be the size of Texas (http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/). And of course, one of its components are those lovely plastic bags. Not only are these islands of plastic toxic to the ocean and its inhabitants but scientists are increasingly concerned about those toxins spreading up the food chain eventually back to...eek! Us! "Most of the plastic will eventually photo-degrade into small, dust-like particles to the point that it will be non-detectable to the human eye, but ingestible by sea mammals, birds, and fish—many of which we then consume ourselves." ("Pacific trash vortex could spell future for our oceans," Summer Rayne Oakes, Treehugger) So now we can also factor into our cost calculations the dollars we'll have to spend on battling the human health impacts of our "free" plastic bags. I guess you could argue that "paying the price for our plastic bag habit" is our constitutional right as well.
