Cloth vs. plastic vs. America

Saw an article in the San Luis Tribune this morning which mentioned the opposition of the plastics industry to cities and counties banning plastic bags being given out in grocery stores. One would think that with all the uses we have for plastics -- everything from bottles to medical equipment to furniture -- that they could give a little on this one for the sake of the environment.  


The scoops from your cat litter box which you remove and place in a paper bag in the trash will decompose over a few months in a landfill.  The same waste product, placed in a plastic bag and put into the same landfill, will still be intact (mummified, yes, but intact) in 1,000 years because the bag will not decompose.  There's good, solid common sense behind banning plastic bags.  Far too often, they are not recycled and are used to wrap up and dispose of waste which could otherwise decompose quite easily.


But the cries of unfairness from the plastics industry have already started...they're working hard to convince people that banning plastic grocery bags will put people out of work, and that the masses will become sick from food-borne ailments because they won't wash their cloth bags and will use them again and again, putting raw meat and produce into them repeatedly until the bags are a veritable petri dish of bacteria.


In other words, they're just trying to help America jobs and keep us all healthy.  


You know, it's one thing to be selfish and protectionist of one's profits, but quite another to elevate one's bullshit to the current level of snow in Nome, Alaska.  A similar thing happened last year in Tulare, CA, when a nice family who'd decided to keep a couple of egg-laying chickens went before the city council to have the zoning designation of their neighborhood amended, to allow a few hens to be kept in residents' backyards, within city limits.  The zoning change was opposed, not by the city council itself, but by representatives from the egg industry, who explained that ordinary people keeping their own hens was simply too dangerous due to the possibility of egg-borne food illness. 


The Tulare city council caved and refused to let the family keep hens.  I hope the residents of San Luis Obispo county smell the bullshit (which smells suspiciously like plastics) a mile away and keep it there.  These are just two more examples of how we know corporate America will never, never, NEVER look out for our best interests, only their own.  The days of the honorable corporation passed as the greatest generation handed off the reins to their spoiled, selfish children.  I am one of that second generation, and I just hope I can behave more responsibly than some of my peers.