L.A. Plastic Bag Ban - By The Way...Reusable Bags Might Be Worse For The Environment - Granite Grok

L.A. Plastic Bag Ban – By The Way…Reusable Bags Might Be Worse For The Environment

This is almost a palate cleanser, but then it is not. Apparently, the LA plastic bag ban was motivated by celebrity goobers with green thumbs.

Egged on by actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus and an array of environmental groups, the City Council voted 13 to 1 to phase out plastic bags over the next 12 months at an estimated 7,500 stores. Councilman Bernard Parks cast the lone no vote

While the LA bag ban is technically a Liberty and freedom issue, I admit that I have been using this (here, here, and here) as the blogging equivalent of that cereal and filler the Dog food companies claim only their competitors use. Or perhaps it is more like the weak Wildebeest on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (Animal Planet or a Discovery Network Channel for the younger folks)  that can’t run away fast enough–it’s just easy prey.  Low-hanging fruit.  The Headline alone commands my fingers to open the tap and fill a 500-word pool with snark-infested waters.  To find clueless celebrities behind the initiative is just chum in the water.

Particularly after I saw this.

An extensive UK study has determined that the reusable grocery bags the lefties love will likley have a higher overall negative environmental impact than the plastic ones LA just banned.  In fact, the minimum number of years you would need to re-use the reusable bag, according to this research, to make them less harmful, is 7.8 Years.  And how long do you need to re-use them to eliminate any environmental impact at all compared to disposable bags? 158.2 years.  Yeah.  That’ll happen.

 

 

Do I need to mention that the plastic disposable ones are made in the US, and most of the reusable ones are made in China?  Left Wing “Job Creation” at its finest.

Oh, and don’t forget that reusable bags have a higher probability of becoming contaminated and therefore cross-contaminating food–see raising health care costs, whose environmental impact is not included in the study just quoted.

And finally, what of Julia Louis-Doofus and her ilk? What are the odds that, if they even do their own grocery shopping and tote their “totes” along with them, they will re-use a reusable grocery bag for a minimum of 7.8 years?

More to the point, what happens when the regular folks these Hollywood elites inspire, and who follow their lead as blindly as they lead them, can’t afford the all cotton, custom hand-made bio-degradable bags Doofus can purchase by the thousands and discard like dental-floss without guilt?  They will be using environmentally hazardous Chinese-made bags that cross-contaminate their food if they do not scrub them out after each use.

Knowing how human nature works, which most Liberals do not–rich ones in particular–the much-needed scrubbing to prevent poisoning yourself and your family might occur the first few times, but when it becomes a tedious chore, they’ll just throw them away when they get nasty and buy new ones.  This will create a new kind of disposable bag problem that contradicts every so-called goal of the nanny state liberal near-do wells and the earthy, crunchy, Birkenstock-wearing, green legions of doom that forced the groundlings to switch to these environmentally hazardous portable Petri dishes in the first place.

Sadly, there is nothing at all surprising about this.  Like everything else wrong inside the progressive mind, two words continue to define the basis of all left-wing policy:  Bovine Vapidity.

 

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