Environmental Consequences

Dear Editor,

I enjoyed Davon Gray’s column “Time to bag the bag tax” (1/10/11).   I completely agree that there should be no bag tax, but the environmental damage caused by plastic bags is a disaster produced by environmentalists. 

My first real job (before Mr. Gray was born) was as a bagger in a California grocery store.  The standard bag was a large, stiff, brown paper one we called a “barrel bag.”  It would hold a great deal, stand up straight on the back seat or in the trunk of your car, and note to environmentalists: if you buried it in moderately damp soil it would disappear quickly adding nutrients to that soil.  Without regard to the utility and Earth-friendly properties of these bags, environmentalists howled that trees were sacrificed precisely to make paper bags.  While that is probably true, note to environmentalists: trees are a renewable resource – we can grow more. 

Unable to stand up to their hysteria grocers Nationwide changed to a less bulky and cheaper alternative – plastic bags.  Plastic bags don’t stand up on the back seat of your car and they free everything to roll around in your trunk as you turn out of the grocery store parking lot.  You can bury them today and come back years later and dig them up.  Further someday in centuries hence we will run out of oil the main ingredient required to make plastic bags.  In the “old days” we cut up those paper bags and covered our school books with them.  Try that with a plastic bag. 

Now the very same environmentalists who demanded plastic bags want to tax us to reduce our use of plastic bags.  Surely even the most radical environmentalist can see the irony here. 

I have a better idea – reintroduce the heavy-duty brown paper barrel bag and tax environmentalists. 

Sincerely Yours,