No, I’m not talking about ‘plastic guns’. I’m talking about HB102, which would add ‘the distribution of single-use plastics to consumers’ to the list of things towns can regulate.
The idea is to let towns ban the use of plastic bags in grocery stores, or plastic drinking straws in restaurants. But ‘single-use’ covers a lot of ground.
That is, wouldn’t something like a bag containing chips, or a lid on a disposable cup of coffee — or the cup itself — be ‘single-use’? Or how about those little bags that you use to collect loose green beans or apples in the produce section of a grocery store? Or the containers that berries come in? Disposable plates and cutlery? The packaging on bacon, or bread, or pens, or ear buds, or batteries, or laundry detergent? The little containers of cream that you get along with your coffee at a diner?
I predict that this will eventually lead to a distinction between ‘assault plastics’ and other kinds of plastics, because ‘single-use’ is just too broad a classification to be useful.
(I also wonder if this isn’t a surreptitious attempt to boost New Hampshire’s forest-products industry, which would make it a companion to last year’s biomass bill. After all, if we have to start packaging everything with single-use paper, instead of single-use plastic, we’re going to need a lot of paper.)