Aside from the bad environmental news you may have heard about the items listed here and here, you may also have heard good things (from the government and from TV "news" programs) about things that aren't necessarily harmless, beneficial, feasible or affordable, such as the items listed here.

One of those supposedly good ideas was ethanol, which turned out to be nothing more than a pork barrel spending item that made several different foods more expensive, made gasoline less powerful, and didn't help the environment at all.

Windmills were supposedly going to produce electricity at no cost, but they turned out to be a bad idea for a number of reasons:  They kill birds and bats, including a lot of federally-protected birds (that apparently aren't protected around windmills!), they make constant noise, they interfere with radar sites, and -- the biggest surprise of all -- they only provide power when the wind is blowing!  Who knew that would happen?

Somewhere around here, there are two pages about compact fluorescent bulbs, or CFLs, a real environmental boondoggle, and an outstanding example of what this page is all about.  The second of those two pages shows a handy cost analysis:  Ordinary incandescent bulbs are much more economical.  But unfortunately the ordinary incandescent light bulb is being phased out, and the CFLs will be mandatory soon, along with 1.6 gallon toilets.

Left-wing liberal anti-capitalist environmentalists have a steady stream of brilliant ideas that make their way into state and federal law, and in most cases, they solve problems we don't have and each one is an affront to individual liberty.  The recent fad of banning plastic bags is just another bad idea in the series.

Introduction:
For decades, we took groceries home in big paper bags, and then for a few years in the 1990's we were given a choice of paper or plastic, and after that, the paper bags disappeared.  Paper bags were easily recyclable, just like plastic, and we now realize that paper bags don't blow away and get snagged in treetops and fences (or washed into the lakes) all over the state, as flimsy plastic bags tend to do.  Yes, paper bags are made from trees, but plastic bags are made from petroleum.  And the nice thing about trees is that after you chop them down, they grow back.

Leftists are constantly making the erroneous claim that "we live in a democracy", yet they never put decisions like this on a ballot and let the voters decide.  Notice, if you will, that small individual freedoms — the ability to choose simple things like "paper or plastic" — disappear first in the areas of our country where liberals predominate.

Plastic straws from Dallas and plastic bags from Chicago are not polluting the oceans.  Only about one percent of plastics in the ocean are from the United States.  60 percent of the plastic trash flowing into the sea originates from China, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. [Source]

Biden-Harris Reverse Course on Plans to Cap Plastic Production and Ban Harmful Chemicals..  The Biden-Harris government has shifted its stance regarding a proposed cap on plastic production in the United Nations' global plastics treaty.  This change was communicated during a private meeting between White House staffers and various environmental advocacy groups last week.  Initially, an August briefing indicated that the United States would align itself with countries such as Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom, which support production limits.  However, representatives have now been informed that mandatory production caps are not considered feasible for the upcoming fifth session of the treaty negotiations in Busan, South Korea.  Instead of binding production limits, U.S. delegates are expected to advocate for a flexible framework where nations can establish their own voluntary reduction targets.  The Biden-Harris government also now favors blacklisting certain plastic products containing harmful chemicals rather than banning the chemicals themselves, a weak and likely ineffectual approach liable to be circumvented at scale.

Exxon Knew!  First Warming and Climate, Now Plastics.  Plastics are essential for our living standards, safety and modern world.  But what happens when they break, wear out or get tossed?  For years they were thrown out with other trash.  But environmentalists, politicians and consumers increasingly demanded that cans, glass and other throwaways be recycled.  For many of us, recycling became a habit.  Recycling turns low-value plastic garbage into valuable materials: window frames, boards for siding decks and fences, pipes to replace copper tubing that thieves steal, toys and toothbrushes, plates and utensils, diapers and clothing, carpeting and lawn furniture, soccer fields, bottles, cabinets, and more.  Neither ExxonMobil nor any other company promoted recycling as a magic solution or cure-all.  It's more expensive than virgin plastic, especially when transportation and sorting costs are factored in.

The myth of plastic recycling is finally unravelling.  Consumers want something to be done about plastic pollution.  Recycling is something.  Therefore oil companies, manufacturers and retailers are doing it.  The trouble is, many of these initiatives are muddle-headed, some fall way short of their promise and others are actively causing more environmental damage than they are preventing.  Tesco's recent travails are a case in point.  In 2021, the supermarket set up bins in its stores in which customers could leave their difficult-to-recycle "soft plastics", like the low density polyethylene from shopping bags and film lids.  At the time the company boldly forecast it would "collect more than 1,000 tonnes a year" and planned to "recycle as much of this material as possible back into products and packaging sold in Tesco stores".  However, according to a recent investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency and the pressure group Everyday Plastic, the vast majority of this waste ended up being incinerated rather than being recycled.  ClientEarth, a non-government organisation that specialises in environmental law, says the results of the investigation show that supermarket soft plastic take-back schemes are misleading customers.

California Passes Law to Ban All Plastic Bags in Grocery Stores.  On Sunday [9/22/2024], California Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) signed a bill into law that will ban the use of plastic bags at grocery stores all across the state.  [Advertisement]  As reported by Axios, the new law follows up on a previous law passed ten years prior which forced stores to start selling "thicker plastic carryout bags that were considered reusable and met certain recyclability standards," said State Senator Catherine Blakespear (D-Calif.), one of the legislators responsible for the new bill.  [Advertisement]  "The truth is almost none of those bags are reused or recycled," Blakespear claimed, without any evidence.  "And they end up in landfills or polluting the environment."  Radical environmentalists have repeatedly claimed that plastic bags make for one of the most commonly-found items in cleanup efforts at public places.  Anja Brandon, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit group Ocean Conservancy, claimed that "volunteers have cleaned up enough plastic bags to span the length of the Golden Gate Bridge nearly 30 times."  She also asserted that plastic bags "are not only one of the most common plastics polluting our beaches, but also one of the top five deadliest forms of plastic pollution to marine life."

The Editor says...
Out of all the millions of plastic grocery bags that are used every year, how many end up in the ocean?  Maybe 10 or 20 per million?  Would the governor of California prefer the return of good old paper grocery bags from 1965?  (I would.)

Somewhat related:
Illinois's Pritzger signs law banning hotel mini-shampoos, to save the planet.  In Illinois, they've figured out how to save the planet:  They're snatching the mini-shampoo bottles off your sink at that pricey hotel you're staying at and making you use a big communal bottle instead. [...] This has the same stupid and oppressive logic as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer banning sales of garden seeds even at allowed-to-be-open Wal-Mart in Michigan during COVID's lockdowns, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg banning 7-Eleven's Big Gulps and stealing salt shakers off diner tables for diners' own good.  It's obnoxious and futile for the purposes stated in the extreme.  But it certainly does satisfy the Democrat urge for power.

Harris Changes Her Tune on Plastic Straws.  Vice President Kamala Harris has changed her position on yet another issue.  On Thursday, a campaign official for the Democratic presidential nominee told Axios she no longer supports banning plastic straws, a position she took during her 2020 presidential campaign.  In 2019, during a CNN town hall event, the progressive was asked whether they should be banned over environmental concerns.  "I think we should," she replied, though she added that paper straws ought to be improved.  [Tweet]

Biden Administration Declares War on Plastic Silverware as Green Obsession Goes Too Far.  On July 19, amid global calamities on a scale unseen since World War II, the Biden-Harris administration announced a plan to eliminate the deadly scourge of plastic silverware.  "Communities across the United States and around the world are facing a plastic pollution crisis," a White House statement began.  It only got worse from there.  In fact, two sentences later, the statement's author made the required genuflection at the liberal altars of equity and apocalypse-mongering.

Biden-Harris regime announces a ban on single-use plastics in federal food service operations.  No one really has any expectation that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would respect the rule of law and American governance and go through the legislature to implement legislation, least of all them, so, by way of the diktat (executive order), these two dimwits recently announced their new "strategy" to "tackle plastic pollution," which notably includes a federal ban on single-use plastics in federal operations. [...] Best case scenario?  A roughly 319% cost increase.  Worst case scenario?  A roughly 753% cost increase.  What a weird coincidence!  The government increasing our costs... again... never decreasing. [...] And, if those are the raw numbers, you can expect the government to amplify the costs and spend far more than what things actually run — don't forget the $435 hammer, and $37 screw, and $4,361 for a half-inch pin.

Earth Day 2024: How Plastic Can the Enviros Get?  It is Earth Day 2024, an annual exercise in self-applause that always is too much fun because of the inanities, hypocrisies, mendacities, and sheer stupidity of the Earth Day slogans, arguments, propaganda, and exhortations.  And also because of the embarrassing spectacle of long queues of corporate officials and public relations gasbags desperate to advertise their environmental bona fides so that the green alligators might eat them last.  The Earth Day slogan for this year is "Planet vs Plastics," and the list of horror stories is staggering. [...] One would think that this horror parade would have made life on earth ever more sickly, disease-ridden, and short.  And one would be wrong: human life expectancy at birth now is 73.33 years, an increase of over 61% from the life expectancy of 45.51 years in 1950.  Has the production of plastics declined?  Of course not:  From 2 million metric tons in 1950, production in 2019 was 459.8 million metric tons.

The green movement is stripping away life's small luxuries, one by one.  Our former colonial masters, the micro-managing misery merchants of the EU's institutions, have agreed on a new way to interfere in our lives with a deal banning sauce sachets and regulating the air inside boxes.  When you fly away on holiday in six years, you may need to pack your own ketchup to address both concerns.  If your suitcase is too empty it might be considered wasteful packaging and be either quarantined as an eco-crime, or stuffed with images of sad-eyed Swedish children whose future you have stolen.  The goal of the snappily titled Revision of the Packaging and Packing Waste Directive is to reduce packaging waste, which is on the rise.  In 2021 each EU citizen generated 189 kg, up about 17 percent over the decade.  This raises questions over the utility of the previous legislation.  Self-evidently it failed.  However, the intention is noble, reducing the impact of some materials, deemed polluting, on the environment, including for example hard to recycle plastics.  All packaging on the EU market will have to be recyclable by 2030.  The best way of encouraging such change is inventing better alternatives.  The rise of plastics over the last 100 years is due to their utility.

California's plastic bag ban has been a failed experiment.  We can now add plastic bag bans to the list of "well-meaning but failed experiments" being run in California.  Two devastating pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times reveal how the environmentalist fervor to rid California of thin, single-use plastic bags resulted in a 47 percent increase in plastic waste statewide.  Before the ban, California produced 314 million pounds of plastic waste.  By 2022, plastic waste in pounds was closer to 462 million.  Both outlets pin the blame on special interests lobbying for exemptions to the ban, which resulted in the now common 10-cent plastic bag so many shoppers encounter in checkout lines both in and out of California, and now lawmakers are moving to pass new legislation that would take plastic bags of all kinds out of circulation.  If reducing environmental impact is the goal, California should brace for another failure.  Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan has made her disdain for plastic bags quite clear in saying, "Ten years ago, California attempted to ban plastic bags to stem pollution.  Yet, these insidious relics persist, choking our waterways, imperiling wildlife, and despoiling our ecosystems."  Insidious is a dramatic word choice.  Consumers know that plastic bags do not belong in waterways, oceans, and blowing across playgrounds.  What is actually insidious — meaning to cause gradual, subtle harm — is the impact of plastic alternatives such as woven bags and paper.

First it Was Plastic Straws, Now Lib State Moves to Ban 'Single-Use' Cups From Chain Restaurants.  First, California came for plastic straws.  It did nothing meaningful for the environment, but it made lawmakers feel good — albeit at the expense of consumers.  Now, the state could be coming for "single-use cups" at chain restaurants.  It'll do nothing for the environment, again, but it'll make lawmakers feel good, again.  Guess what it will do to your wallet, Californians?  According to The Center Square, a conservative publication, Democrat Sen. Catherine Blakespear, who represents a district in the San Diego suburbs, has introduced Senate Bill 1167, which would require chain restaurants to stop using paper or plastic single-use beverage cups.

California's green mania continues to make life difficult for its residents.  I first saw aseptic containers when I was in Europe in the early 1980s and thought they were wonderful.  They meant soups, juices, eggs, and other products that would last as long as canned goods but that wouldn't taste of the can, even while making food easier to store and ship. [...] We're all familiar with the bans already in place in California:  paper bags, single-use plastic bags, straws, plastic utensils — they've all been put on the chopping block.  The latest targets are containers that cannot be recycled or composted: [...] According to CalRecycle, aseptic containers will soon be verboten.  The ramifications are serious. [...] Whether California laws affect others across America will also play out this year now that its anti-animal cruelty law is going into effect.  Moving forward, all animal goods sold in California must have been raised in an environment optimal for the animals' mental health and well-being.

New Jersey Plastic Bag Ban [was] Followed By Increased Use of Plastic.  Governor Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) and New Jersey state legislators touted a new law banning plastic and paper shopping bags at stores when they enacted it in 2020.  According to a new study, however, passage of New Jersey's anti-plastics law has been followed by a near tripling of plastic consumption at Garden State checkouts.  "Plastic bags are one of the most problematic forms of garbage, leading to millions of discarded bags that stream annually into our landfills, rivers, and oceans," Governor Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) said at the bag ban bill signing ceremony in November 2020. [...] Four years on, however, there is evidence that New Jersey's bag prohibition not only failed to curb plastic usage, it backfired.  According to a new study released on January 9 by the Freedonia Group, 53 million pounds worth of plastic shopping bags were used in New Jersey prior to implementation of the state's bag ban, a figure that has risen to 151 million pounds since the prohibition was instituted.

Five things the Biden administration has attempted to restrict.  [#3]  Plastic straws:  Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced in June that a plan would be implemented to phase out single-use plastics on public lands by 2032, citing environmental impacts.  In response to the proposed action, the House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill that would prevent the Interior Department from going forward with the effort.  Rep. John Rose (R-TN), who introduced the amendment to deny the measure, argued the alternatives to plastics may not be more environmentally friendly.  "We have to ask:  Why is the Department of Interior rushing to ban plastic straws in National Parks when it is far from clear whether or not there is any environmental benefit to switching to paper straws?" Rose said on the House floor while discussing his amendment.  "Additionally, paper straws are absolutely despised by many Americans because they start to become soggy almost immediately when put into a drink."

Lego drops plans to make bricks from recycled plastic bottles.  Lego has abandoned plans to make its famous bricks from recycled plastic bottles, saying that the manufacturing process would be more polluting than the current production of oil-based bricks.  Lego made the decision — first reported by the Financial Times Sunday — after it spent years testing recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) as a more climate-friendly alternative to the acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) it uses in the majority of its toys.  The toymaker has pledged to use only sustainable materials in its products by 2032 and, two years ago, unveiled a prototype brick made from recycled PET. The plastic was sourced from bottles that are typically used for water or soda.  Since then, however, Lego has found that making bricks from the recycled material would require investing in new equipment and involve more steps, which would ultimately lead to more planet-heating pollution than the status quo, a company spokesperson told CNN Monday.

The Editor says...
One Lego factory isn't going to have any measurable impact on the atmosphere, or the temperature, or the weather.  And even if it does, Legos might be worth it.

Ode to clear plastic produce bags and fresh vegetables.  Remember clear plastic bags, their rolls hanging above the produce so you could grab a handful of green beans or a dozen limes?  Maybe you're lucky and live somewhere they're still in use.  I am not so lucky, and I miss those ubiquitous clear rectangles for a lot of reasons.  Alas, they are being "phased" out.

RFK Jr says he would ban fracking in 10-point plan to tackle plastics pollution.  Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while announcing his 10-point plan to end the plastics pollution crisis, said he would ban fracking.  The process of fracking involves high pressure injections of liquid into underground rocks and layers to open fissures and extract oil or gas.  The United Nations says each year, 19-23 million tons of plastic waste leaks into waterways, polluting rivers, seas, and lakes.

Massachusetts Governor Unveils Bold Plan to Save the World by Banning Water Bottles.  Once again, another progressive politician has proposed a policy that might sound good on the surface but will probably do more harm than good.  Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has put forth an idea to protect the environment by doing away with single-use plastic bottles.  The governor argues that this move will do wonders for reducing damage to the environment and promoting sustainable practices.  However, this solution might not be all that it seems.

Presence of 'Forever Chemicals' in Paper Straws Highlights the Inanity of Plastic Straw Bans.  A new study published yesterday by Belgian researchers in the journal Food Additives & Contaminants found that paper straws contained higher concentrations of poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — more commonly known as "forever chemicals" because of how long they take to break down in nature — than plastic and steel straws.  PFAS are frequently used in consumer products and industrial processes, given their water- and fire-resistant properties.  Their use is also controversial given that they can be toxic at high concentrations, and even small concentrations can accumulate in bodies and natural environments over time.  Dozens of states have already passed laws to restrict some PFAS.  Similar, unsuccessful efforts have been introduced in Congress.  The European Union has also considered banning them.  These efforts have done little to keep forever chemicals out of paper straws, however.

Paper Straws Require More Energy and Carbon Emissions to Make Than Plastic.  I've been doing some day trips that land me in or near Portsmouth, New Hampshire's mecca for poorly thought-out anti-plastic policy.  From 'shopping bags' to paperboard containers, their war on plastic is relentless, even when those replacements are worse for the environment.  We've debunked the ocean plastic myth, and even drinking straws declared a scourge based on land and sea, with the appropriate response from progressive posers.  Since then, paper straws have continued to make their way into restaurants and the mouths of their patrons without much pushback.  I've seen my fair share around Portsmouth, and I always have the same thought.  How can this engineered paper tube use less energy or emit less carbon?  The answer is it can't.  What's worse, research out of Europe, following up on research in the US, suggests a majority of them could leach forever chemicals into people using them.

Don't expect the greens' 1,600 percent mistake on ocean plastic to get them to change course.  For climate warriors and enviro-radicals, the science (their science, anyway) is always "settled."  That is, until it isn't.  The latest backtrack?  Turns out there's less plastic in the oceans than claimed.  Far less.  Per a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience, just 500,000 metric tons of plastic end up in the world's oceans each year, not the 8 million tons previously bewailed.  That's an overestimation of 1,600%!  Meanwhile, worries about ocean plastic have fueled restrictions on the use of a range of products — shopping bags, utensils, straws — no matter the inconveniences or side effects.

New York will now fine restaurants for including a common takeout add-on in their to-go meals.  In an effort to reduce plastic use, New York will start fining restaurants and third-party delivery services that provide disposable utensils, soy sauce packets, and similar items without the customer requesting them.  In late June, New York City announced plans to implement its new "Skip the Stuff" bill, which aims to reduce plastic use by fining restaurants and delivery services handing out unsolicited plastic items like ketchup and cutlery.  Food vendors and delivery services have a moment to adapt.  Actual fines won't start being handed out until July of 2024, and until then, violators will only receive warnings, Bloomberg reports.

On Second Thought, Just Throw Plastic Away.  Even Greenpeace has finally acknowledged the truth:  recycling plastic makes no sense.  This has been obvious for decades to anyone who crunched the numbers, but the fantasy of recycling plastic proved irresistible to generations of environmentalists and politicians.  They preached it to children, mandated it for adults, and bludgeoned municipalities and virtue-signaling corporations into wasting vast sums — probably hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide — on an enterprise that has been harmful to the environment as well as to humanity.  Now Greenpeace has seen the light, or at least a glimmer of rationality.  The group has issued a report accompanied by a press release headlined, "Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street — Year After Year, Plastic Recycling Declines Even as Plastic Waste Increases."  The group's overall policy remains delusional — the report proposes a far more harmful alternative to recycling — but it's nonetheless encouraging to see environmentalists put aside their obsessions long enough to contemplate reality.

This is not off-topic:
July 4 Fireworks Canceled Due to Climate Change Activists.  Woke Los Angeles sacrificed the celebration of the Fourth of July this year on the altar of climate change gods by canceling several fireworks on the birthday of the American nation because of new environmental regulations.  As of May 25, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board started forcing all fireworks vendors to obtain a permit for their public displays and use biodegradable plastics after adopting a countywide order.  The Washington Examiner reported that the decision was made to curb ocean pollution that was caused by plastic debris following all fireworks shows.  Even though most shows in the area will obtain their permits, at least five shows will be canceled over the holiday weekend because one firework company — Pyro Spectaculars by Souza — didn't bow down to the climate change mob by refusing to comply with the new rules over its employees' safety concerns.

Plastic in the ocean is un-American; China is the big offender.  Steve Moore's "Committee to Unleash Prosperity" often shares charts and graphs that graphically illustrate otherwise complex arguments, a simple picture often being worth a thousand words.  One especially impressive bar chart calls attention to a thorough study, published in the journal "Environmental Science," analyzing plastic debris in the world's oceans to find out how it got there.  It is an eye-opener for anti-plastic crusaders everywhere.  The study was led by Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany and has been cited in more than 650 other articles and studies, nearly all of which confirm the findings.  Here is the short version — the massive amount of plastic debris floating in the world's oceans is not dumped from ships, but is carried there from 10 major rivers.  Virtually all of it.  The study found that these 10 rivers transport up to 95% of the global plastic "load" into the oceans.  None of them are in the U.S. In fact, statistically speaking, the percentage of the world's plastic debris found in oceans that comes from the U.S. is precisely zero.

Homeless Guy Complains The Free Meals At The Shelter Are Bad For The Enviroment.  Looks like beggars can be choosers.  [Video clip]

The Yangtze deposits 55% of all river marine plastic pollution.  Rivers deposit 2.75 million metric tonnes of plastic into the seas each year, with just ten rivers contributing up to 95% of the world's total waste.  Five of these rivers — including the Yellow River, Hai He River, Pearl River and the Amur River — flow through China.  However, the Yangtze, the third longest river in the world, is by far the worst offender.  Of the 2.75 million metric tonnes of plastic waste deposited into the ocean by rivers each year, 1.5 million, or 55%, flows out of the Yangtze.  This figure is according to a study led by Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist at the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research, which was recently published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal.  The study looked at data on 79 sampling sites along 57 rivers.

Just 10 rivers carry 90% of plastic polluting the oceans.  Just 10 rivers are carrying 90% of the plastic entering the oceans, a study has found.  Two of them are in Africa — the Nile and the Niger — while the others are in Asia: the Indus, Ganges, Amur, Mekong, Pearl, Hai he, Yellow and Yangtze.  As well as being some of the world's longest rivers, they have big populations alongside them.  The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, also said they tend to be in countries where waste control could be better.

Ten rivers in Asia and Africa cause up to 95% of ocean plastic pollution.  A 2017 study published in Environmental Science & Technology found that ten rivers are responsible for up to 95% of the plastic dumped into oceans.
  [#1]   Yangtze
  [#2]   Indus
  [#3]   Yellow
  [#4]   Hai He
  [#5]   Nile
  [#6]   Ganges
  [#7]   Pearl
  [#8]   Amur
  [#9]   Niger
  [#10]   Mekong
A 2010 study found that China, India, and the Phillippines account for 5.57 million metric tons of plastic dumped into oceans.  That same year, the United States was responsible for 0.11 million metric tons of plastic dumped into oceans.

Farewell to straws?  Two of the biggest sellers of drinks normally consumed with straws are testing out plastic lids that have no hole for a straw. [...] Both companies implicitly acknowledge that paper straws are worse than useless.  They get wet and collapse when suction is applied, which aggravates customers more than a complete absence of straws (and straw holes) would.  This looming ban on all straws is motivated by a study conducted by a nine-year-old.  Purportedly, marine life is threatened by plastic straws that are discarded into the oceans.  But a huge percentage of the plastic waste in oceans comes from a few major rivers in Asia.  I think that US plastic straws end up in landfill nearly always.  Cute little sea creatures need no protecting from my plastic straws.

Plastic Eating Bacteria Found By Japanese Scientists.  Scientists in Japan have discovered a new species of bacteria that can digest and breakdown the common plastic known as PET or polyethylene terephthalate.  PET is considered to be a major environmental hazard because it is highly resistant to breakdown[.] [...] Previously, the only species found to break down PET were rare fungi.  Now, scientists in Japan have discovered bacteria that can biodegrade this hardy plastic.  "The bacterium is the first strain having a potential to degrade PET completely into carbon dioxide and water," said study co-author Kohei Oda, an applied microbiologist at the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan.  The researchers collected 250 samples of PET debris from soil and wastewater from a plastic-bottle-recycling site.  They scanned these samples for bacteria that could eat PET.

Plastic Recycling Is a Dead-End Street.  Many cities have mandated recycling.  Recycling doesn't save money, it costs money.  If it saved money, a mandate wouldn't be necessary.  The recycled material is sold on the market, but certainly income from such sales doesn't cover expenses.  The reason for recycling is about "saving the planet."  Probably most of those cities mandating recycling include plastics.  Remember hearing in the news a few years ago that China, which recycled most of the world's plastic, wasn't going to do it anymore?  What is happening to all that garbage material collected?  It turns out that plastics can't be recycled, at least in a manner that makes any sense, economic or otherwise.

Greenpeace gives up on recycling plastic.  Recycling almost everything is an uneconomic scam, but that hasn't stopped many localities from enforcing recycling mandates, and employing lots of people to sort through garbage and spend large sums on trying to find another use for the materials.  At great expense to taxpayers.  But finally, Greenpeace has realized that recycling plastic makes no sense.

Plastic recycling [is] a "failed concept," study says, with only 5% recycled in U.S. last year as production rises.  Plastic recycling rates are declining even as production shoots up, according to a Greenpeace USA report out Monday that blasted industry claims of creating an efficient, circular economy as "fiction."  Titled "Circular Claims Fall Flat Again," the study found that of 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by U.S. households in 2021, only 2.4 million tons were recycled, or around five percent.  After peaking in 2014 at 10 percent, the trend has been decreasing, especially since China stopped accepting the West's plastic waste in 2018.  Virgin production — of non-recycled plastic, that is — meanwhile is rapidly rising as the petrochemical industry expands, lowering costs.

New Jersey banned plastic bags.  So, people are stealing grocery store shopping baskets.  Grocery store customers are walking off with those plastic hand baskets you find in the supermarket, an apparent consequence of New Jersey's plastic bag ban that went into effect this spring.  "They are just disappearing," said Louis Scaduto Jr., chief executive officer of Middletown-based Food Circus Super Markets, which owns four Super Foodtown stores in Monmouth County.  "I may actually have to just do away with them soon, can't afford to keep replacing them," Scaduto wrote in a text message.  It's not just happening at Super Foodtown.  Stop & Shop in Long Branch didn't have any hand baskets during a recent visit.  ShopRite in Freehold Township didn't have any either.

Questions the Climate Police Won't Answer.  Why do the greenies keep pushing plastics recycling when making new plastic is cheaper, and recycling plastic produces 55 times more carbon emissions than sticking it in a landfill?

Plastic Recycling Doesn't Work and Will Never Work.  Americans support recycling.  We do too.  But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot.  Plastic recycling does not work and will never work.  The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled — even though much of it wasn't.  Recycling in general can be an effective way to reclaim natural material resources.  The U.S.'s high recycling rate of paper, 68 percent, proves this point.  The problem with recycling plastic lies not with the concept or process but with the material itself.

A Little Truth About Microplastics.  While most Californians sleep at night, there must be a group somewhere that stays up thinking of something else to ban.  How else to explain the unrelenting march of prohibitions, from single-use plastic bags — directly approved by voters — to plastic straws, to gasoline-powered lawn equipment and eventually the sale of new automobiles that burn the same fossil fuel?  The sleepless evenings have kept the state's war on plastics burning hot.  A campaign to at least limit the volume of microplastics — beads smaller than 5 millimeters across produced by the breakdown of plastic products — that end up in the sea is catching fire.  According to the Los Angeles Times:  "California aims to sharply limit the spiraling scourge of microplastics in the ocean, while urging more study of this threat to fish, marine mammals and potentially to humans, under a plan a state panel approved" on Feb. 23.

New Jersey Dept of Environmental Police, Set up Snitch Line to Report Contraband Plastic and Styrofoam Users.  Comrades, starting today [5/4/2022] it is illegal in New Jersey to have plastic or paper bags in stores for shoppers.  Additionally, restaurants, cafeterias and food trucks are forbidden to serve take-out food in Styrofoam-like products.  Also, all retailers must stop selling polystyrene foam products like plates and cups.  Drinking straws require a permit for restricted distribution as monitored by the Department of Health.  To ensure legal compliance within the Garden State, officials in New Jersey have established a snitch hotline for citizens to call the Dept of Environmental Police (DEP) and report dissident violators, while the state ministry of citizen compliance have created a "WARN DEP" app to facilitate easier snitching on your neighbors if you spot them using contraband containers.

Rail thefts leave tracks littered with pilfered packages.  The scene was a stretch of railroad tracks in Lincoln Heights on Saturday:  A blizzard of torn plastic wrappers, cardboard boxes and paper packaging attesting to a wave of rail car thievery that officials say has been on the rise in recent months.  Several scavengers picked through the debris, hoping to find electronics, clothes or whatever valuables thieves left behind.  "Everything comes on the train — cellphones, Louis Vuitton purses, designer clothes, toys, lawnmowers, power equipment, power tools," said a 37-year-old man who declined to give his name.  He said he comes to the tracks regularly and once found a Louis Vuitton purse and a robotic arm worth five figures:  "We find things here and there, make some money off of it."

The Editor says...
California is the state that outlawed plastic straws and single-use bags because they might end up in the ocean, but their soft-on-crime politics allow large mobs of people to commit train robberies and throw plastic packaging everywhere.  Many video clips accompanying news stories about these train robberies show plastic and paper littering railroad tracks.

'The Plastics Paradox,' or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bag.  Plastics account for only 13 percent of all waste, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, far less than paper or cardboard.  You may have heard horror stories about the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," supposedly a giant, floating blob of marine debris that is assumed to be composed of bottles and bags and other plastic detritus from terra firma.  Most of the materials are, in fact, discarded fishing nets and other forms of waste from fishing boats, [Chris] DeArmitt explains.  Although DeArmitt concedes this is still a major problem, he notes the solution is not to keep everybody from using plastic but instead to enact policies and laws that give fishermen incentives to bring their trash with them back to dry land.  Most people take it as a self-evident truth that plastics take around 1,000 years to degrade, but DeArmitt notes this is extremely unlikely, because plastics are rather unstable.  In an experiment where a standard polyethylene bag was left outdoors, it disintegrated into pieces after just nine months.  In reality, DeArmitt notes, standard plastics "degrade outdoors in a few years, or even sooner, unless they are stabilized."  The widespread concern about plastics is a result of rampant misinformation, DeArmitt argues.

Yet Another Man-made Crisis.  [Scroll down]  Almost all of the created-crisis-creating plastic pollution in the oceans is so small that you cannot see it.  This admission aligns well with my personal experience.  Like Nils-Axel Mörner, I am a dedicated fan of the "Oh yeah?  Let me see for myself"-school of evidence.  Until I retired five years ago, I had spent one half of my adult life living on the sea on boats and ships, both as a professional mariner and as Captain of my own vessels.  I have a lot of sea miles under my belt.  To actually see something floating on the surface of the sea is so very rare that it invariably calls for closer inspection at least by binoculars or at other times by a brief divergence from one's intended course to "go have a look".  Failing to investigate an object large enough to be seen at any distance was considered negligent by the Captains I have served under and I have followed suit when I was the Captain.  The "garbage patch" is a fraudulent invention — a fantasy.

California commission claims retailers [are] violating [California's] plastic bag law.  Big retailers are breaking California law and misleading consumers by selling plastic shopping bags bearing language and symbols that falsely suggest the bags can be recycled, a state-appointed commission alleged this month.  The group has asked California to force retailers to strip these bags of the ubiquitous "chasing arrows" logo and the words "recycle" and "recyclable," Reuters has learned.  If successful, that move could make the sacks ineligible for sale at checkout counters throughout America's most populous state.  The commission also is taking aim at padded envelopes and packaging materials used for home delivery, and plastic films on some grocery items.

Los Angeles bans condiment packets in restaurants to overcome "extreme climate challenges".  The city of Los Angeles has moved to ban restaurants from distributing condiment packets as part of its efforts to fight an imaginary threat called climate change.  Fox Business reported that a new ordinance passed by L.A. officials bans restaurants with 26 employees or more from giving out packets of ketchup and mustard to customers.  Customers must specifically request for the condiments before restaurants can issue them.  The ordinance approved Nov. 15 will apply to all restaurants in the city by April 2022.  Aside from condiment packets, the ban also extends to plastic utensils, napkins, splash sticks and toothpicks.  Erring restaurants will only receive warnings for the first and second violations.  For the third and succeeding violations, they will be fined an administrative penalty of $25 per day — with an annual limit of $300.  According to a Nov. 16 press release, L.A. city council members Paul Krekorian and Paul Koretz were responsible for the ordinance.  "Larger restaurants in L.A. are now officially partners in the effort to address the environmental catastrophe caused by the disposal of millions of pounds of plastic waste along our beautiful California coastline.  Their compliance is critical as we aggressively counter what has been a major contribution to the climate crisis," Krekorian said.

The Editor says...
[#1] There is no climate crisis.  [#2] Let's see the pictures of "millions of pounds of plastic waste along [the] California coastline.  Millions of pounds?  Really?  [#3] Why are napkins and toothpicks banned?

Because the napkins go straight from the restaurant's trash can to the Indian Ocean.
Diners now have to ask for plastic utensils and napkins in Los Angeles.  Customers at Los Angeles restaurants will only get plastic utensils and napkins if they ask for them, under a new ordinance taking effect Monday that aims to reduce waste.  The rule requires all restaurants with more than 26 employees to remove all single-use plastic utensil dispensers, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Noted in Passing:  Green Lies Continue.  [Scroll down]  Here's a more recent story featured on both CNN and FOX News, "A huge swirling pile of trash in the Pacific Ocean is growing faster than expected and is now three times the size of France...".  Oh really?  Three times the size of France?  How was this verified?  Did someone go out there with a tape measure?  No.  Did the International Space Station record footage as it orbited overhead?  No.  NASA satellite Imagery?  No.  US Navy Reconnaissance?  No.  Google Maps Satellite view?  No.  National Geographic Special Report?  No.  There is NO evidence of this [...] thing.  Just drawings, assertions, phony composites, and scary stories, endlessly repeated.  What started as a [deceptive] article written by Captain Moore has now mushroomed into tales of FIVE Great Garbage Patches.

1.6 Billion Disposable Masks Entered Our Oceans In 2020.  Following the World Health Organization's formal declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world quickly mandated the use of face masks in public spaces.  This led to a massive demand shock, prompting factories to begin producing disposable masks at full capacity.  The majority of these masks were produced in China, and in April 2020, the country reported a staggering daily production figure of 450 million masks.  In Ocean Asia's 2020 report, Masks on the Beach, researchers developed a formula to provide reasonable estimates for the number of disposable masks entering the environment.  Given an annual production figure of 52 billion disposable masks and a loss rate of 3% (the percentage of masks that escape water management systems), Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu notes that the team concluded that nearly 1.6 billion face masks wound up in our oceans in 2020.  This amounts to approximately 5,500 tons of plastic pollution.

The Editor says...
To put this as politely as I can, (ahem) I find this report very difficult to believe.  When you dispose of a face mask, where do you put it?  In the trash, in the back seat of your car, or anywhere in the Wal-Mart parking lot.  You don't throw it in the river.  The cities whose residents do throw their garbage in the river are in Asia, Africa, and India.

90% of plastic polluting our oceans comes from just 10 rivers.  Over the last decade we have become increasingly alarmed at the amount of plastic in our oceans.  More than 8 million tons of it ends up in the ocean every year.  If we continue to pollute at this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.  But where does all this plastic waste come from?  Most of it is washed into the ocean by rivers.  And 90% of it comes from just 10 of them, according to a study.  By analyzing the waste found in the rivers and surrounding landscape, researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean.  Eight of them are in Asia:  the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa — the Nile and the Niger.

The Editor says...
[#1]  None of these rivers are anywhere near North America.
[#2]  China and India are the world's worst polluters, not the U.S.
[#3]  Banning plastic straws in the U.S. will not change the amount of plastic trash in the ocean.

California's Plastic Bag Ban Returns After Two-Month Vacation.  California's coronavirus pandemic lockdown isn't over.  There was even a partial reversal of the state's reopening on the first day of July when Gov. Gavin Newsom hit the "dimmer switch." But not much can come between California and its plastic bag ban.  After a two-month vacation, it's back.  In late April, Newsom issued an order that suspended the prohibition on the single-use plastic bags that for decades had become part of an unspoken agreement between customers and retailers.  (We've used the word "ban" to describe California's plastic-bag policy, but, as has been smartly pointed out elsewhere, it's actually an "upgrade" in which consumers who want bags are forced to buy thicker, heavier bags unless they bring their own reusables.)  The temporary directive was based on concerns that the reusable bags used by many could harbor the virus and spread it.

Ohio Republican Claims Proposed Plastics Ban Will Collapse Oil and Gas Industry.  A three-year ban on plastics production in legislation congressional Democrats are pushing will collapse the oil and gas industry, causing major national economic damage, according to Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio).  "There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to achieve a ban on hydraulic fracturing" Johnson told The Epoch Times on May 24 regarding Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm's recent statement that the Biden administration supports a ban on hydraulic fracking for fossil fuels on all public lands.  She made the statement in response to a question from the Ohio Republican at an Energy Subcommittee Hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  Granholm's statement has prompted confusion because Biden has previously said he only supports a temporary moratorium on public lands fracking rather than an outright ban with no time limits.

Denver Ordinance Aims To Reduce Use Of Plastic Utensils, Napkins & Straws.  In a unanimous vote on Monday night [5/17/2021], Denver City Council passed a bill aimed at reducing the use of plastic utensils, napkins, straws and other single-use accessories.  The new ordinance changes Denver's Revised Municipal Code to require restaurants and third-party delivery platforms to only provide the single-use items upon request.  The bill does not prevent businesses from offering the utensils or condiments to customers.  Exceptions to the ordinance include self-service stations, special events, prepackaged items, meals provided as part of a social service, and meals provided to hotel guests.  Under the ordinance, third-party delivery platforms can still use cup lids, spill plugs and trays in order to prevent spills while delivering food and beverages.

NYC Council votes to severely restrict plastic straw use in restaurants, bars.  New York City will continue to restrict use of plastic straws after the city council passed a new measure restricting their use in restaurants, bars and markets.  The legislation, first introduced by Councilmember Rafael Espinal in 2018, bans the provision of single-use plastic stirrers and "splash sticks" of any kind, in addition to the limitation of straws.  Beginning Nov. 1, places like restaurants, cafes, bars, grocery stores, delis and food trucks can no longer provide single-use plastic straws unless they actively request one.  In that case, establishments will be required to provide a plastic straw free of charge, no questions asked.  To refuse to provide the plastic straw, or to ask why, could constitute a violation of New York City's human rights law.

The Editor says...
You MUST ask for a straw.  Then, they MUST give it to you.  This is what happens in a godless city where nobody has ever heard of the Golden Rule.

The massive ocean plastic exaggeration.  There seems to be no end to the absurdities spread by the "Green" movement in concert with the media.  Your patience with their scams may have let you ignore it.  Nevertheless, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been well publicized as another of the great environmental tragedies of our time.  They, including CNN, have said it is twice the size of Texas, and that the central Pacific Ocean is completely covered by garbage, mostly plastics.  Few folks could ever see it in person, so it was easy to photoshop entire fake pictures on ther Internet.  And they claim images of ocean debris such as that which existed following the tsunami off the coast of Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 are actually of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Patrick Moore and the Agenda of Fear.  Politically motivated climate alarmists are using fear to gain control of human behavior and environmental resources and undermine free, prosperous societies. [...] The "great Pacific garbage patch," mostly plastic and twice the size of Texas, is another photoshopped faux disaster.  [Dr. Patrick] Moore writes that, much like the vilification of carbon energy, the damning of plastic is fallacious.  He says plastic is a sterile, versatile, and useful product that helps protect food from contamination and spoilage.  It's no more toxic than driftwood.  Ocean life has adapted to plastic:  many marine species live in cocoons of plastic trash; many species lay eggs on plastic, feeding fish and birds.  In fact, research has shown that birds swallow bits of plastic to help aid digestion in the gizzard, much like they swallow tiny stones and bits of wood, which are then regurgitated.  Besides, plastic constitutes only a small amount of the indigestible material birds ingest.

New Jersey signs strongest plastic and paper bag ban in US.  On Nov. 4, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed the strongest single-use bag ban in the nation, effectively prohibiting the use of single-use plastic and paper bags in all stores and food service establishments across the state.  The bill, S864, was introduced into the New Jersey state Senate with five primary sponsors, including Sens. Bob Smith, Linda Greenstein, and Nancy Pinkin, all Democrats.  It traveled through several committees before being passed on Sept. 24.  Some of the containers affected by the ban include plastic carryout bags, single-use paper carryout bags, polystyrene foam food service products (commonly known as Styrofoam), as well as the limited usage of plastic drinking straws.

NJ governor signs strict single-use paper, plastic bag ban into law.  New Jersey's comprehensive ban on single-use plastic and paper bags was signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy on Wednesday, marking what some claim is the "strongest" measure against single-use plastics in the nation.  The new law prohibits all stores and food-service businesses statewide from using such items, as well as disposable food containers and cups made out of polystyrene foam, starting in May 2022.  Food-service businesses will only be able to provide single-use plastic straws upon request starting November 2021.  While some states impose a fee on paper bags, New Jersey lawmakers say the state would be the first to ban paper bags.

New York Begins Enforcing Ban On Plastic Bags.  New York State begins enforcing a ban on plastic bags Monday [10/19/2020].  The ban was supposed to start on March 1, but a lawsuit by the plastic bag industry held up enforcement.  The suit was later rejected by the State Supreme Court.  Advocates for the ban say plastic bags have been wreaking havoc on the environment.

Canada is Banning Single-Use Plastic Bags, Straws, and Cutlery Next Year.  Plastic is polluting our rivers, lakes, and oceans, harming wildlife, and generating microplastics in the water we use and drink.  That's why the Canadian government is promising to ban single-use plastics in 2021.  Every year, Canadians throw away 3 million tonnes of plastic waste, only 9% of which is recycled, meaning the vast majority of plastics end up in landfills and about 29,000 tonnes finds its way into our natural environment.  On October 7, Canada's Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Jonathan Wilkinson, announced the next steps in the government's plan to achieve zero plastic waste by 2030. [...] A key part of the announcement is a ban on harmful single-use plastic items where there is evidence that they are found in the environment, are often not recycled, and have readily available alternatives.

The Editor says...
Doesn't Canada have landfills?  What percentage of the plastic bags going into the rivers?

Plastic Bags Are Back.  At a time when the world is focused on cleanliness, trendy — yet filthy — germ-carrying practices of the past are being discarded for common sense and good hygiene.  Yes, I'm talking about bringing back single-use plastic bags for grocery and convenience stores.  The saga of the plastic bag ban began in 2007, when the city of San Francisco banned them in the name of saving the planet.  Many other large cities followed suit with similar bans or fees for using single-use bags in stores.  As of January this year, eight states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Vermont — have banned single-use plastic bags.  This ridiculous trend has set a precedent for banning plastic drinking straws, coffee cup lids, and other modern-day conveniences despite their clean qualities.

Plastic Bag Bans Do More Harm Than Good.  [Scroll down]  Reusable bags already brought bacteria into stores.  We're supposed to wash them, but almost no one does.  Studies found reusable bags crawling with dangerous bacteria.  After plastic bags were banned in San Francisco, food poisoning deaths increased sharply.  But environmental groups, like Greenpeace, call those disease fears "misinformation."  "There are no studies or evidence that reusable bags are transmitting viruses," says Alex Truelove of the Public Interest Research Group, in my new video.  He's right.  There are no human studies, but COVID-19 is so new.  Millions of piglets died from swine coronavirus.  The agriculture department concluded that reusable feed bags were probably the cause.  Still, even now, some politicians can't wait to ban plastic again.  Boston Mayor Marty Walsh says "as soon as this crisis is over we'll go back to all paper bags and reusable bags."  "Politicians are always just looking for something to do," complains supermarket executive Andrea Catsimatidis.  She points out that paper bags cost five times what plastic costs.  "When you're talking billions of bags, it really adds up!"  And paper bags don't hold as much.  They rip.  Plastic is more convenient.  Why must politicians take away what's convenient?

Stop the Virus Now, Save the Planet Later.  Greens will go on fighting to keep the [recycling] programs, just as they battle to promote reusable tote bags at supermarkets, despite the known health risks.  Well before the current crisis, researchers repeatedly demonstrated that tote bags harbor deadly bacteria and viruses, because so few people bother to wash the bags.  One study traced an outbreak of viral gastroenteritis to bacteria from a tote bag; another found an increase in bacteria-related illnesses and deaths in San Francisco after the city enacted the nation's first law banning single-use plastic bags in grocery stores.  Ignoring these risks — and the larger carbon footprints of the tote bags — environmental groups successfully promoted the bags while lobbying cities and states to ban or restrict single-use plastic bags in stores.  But now even San Francisco has banned reusable bags for the time being, as have the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, as well as some supermarket chains.  Other cities and states have suspended their bans on single-use plastic bags and discouraged shopping with reusable bags.

Beware bug-breeding reusable grocery bags.  City Councilman Mark Gjonaj is rightly pushing to set aside the city's new 5-cent fee on paper bags at grocery stores and the like in the face of the coronavirus threat.  The Bronx Democrat, who heads the Small Business Committee, say he's behind the fee in principle "to encourage New Yorkers to use the more environmentally friendly option of reusable bags in normal times, but the science is clear:  Reusable bags are more susceptible to carrying the coronavirus."

Welcome Back, Plastic Bags.  Single-use plastic bags are a miracle of modern technology.  Cheap, light, convenient, and ubiquitous, they provide an elegant solution to a problem.  If you recycle them, as most people do, and put your rubbish in them, that creates a net reduction in carbon emissions compared with buying the heavier, thicker garbage bags sold in stores.  Best of all, they're sanitary.  Cue up a head-spinning headline:  San Francisco has just banned the use of reusable tote bags and switched back to single-use plastic bags to help fight the spread of the coronavirus.  In New Hampshire, on March 21, Governor Chris Sununu signed an executive order to the same effect.

The Left's Plastic Bag Ban Crashing and Burning During Coronavirus Pandemic.  The ban of plastic bags at stores, one of the left's favorite causes, is crashing and burning as doctors now warn that cloth bags can transmit the Wuhan virus.The left-wing City of San Francisco has quietly ended its 13-year ban on plastic bags in stores and will now prohibit the use of reusable, cloth bags because they may harbor viruses and disease.  This is something that the left knew for a very long time.  But they have ignored the facts because they were all so caught up in their global warming religion and "saving the planet" from evil, evil plastic bags.

Dirty Hippies Rediscover Plastic Shopping Bags.  It turns out that the reusable bags are filthy little germ catchers and carriers, the last things anyone wants around while trying to slow the spread of a pandemic virus.  The Poop Sidewalk brain trust that runs San Francisco has even gone so far as to reverse the ban on plastic bags that has been in place for over a decade.  The lesson here is obvious:  hippies and enviro freaks are always wrong.

Plastic Bags and the Recycling and Reuse Scam.  Americans are correct to recognize the perils of reusable grocery "tote bags" during this time of heightened disease risk.  May they also realize the entire concept of reusable grocery bags is flawed, along with most recycling programs, and adapt accordingly.

San Francisco Bans Reusable Grocery Bags, Returns to Plastic Bags.  The notoriously far-left city of San Francisco has reversed its own ban on plastic bags in response to the spread of the coronavirus, now prohibiting the use of reusable bags as a sanitary measure, according to Politico.  The push to ban plastic bags, which leftists have claimed, without evidence, are more likely to cause pollution, had been achieved in many liberal cities, from San Francisco to New York.  However, with the fear of spreading the contagious coronavirus, the same bags being used multiple times are more likely to help spread the disease than single-use plastic bags.

Democrats see their plastic-bag-free world crumble before coronavirus.  [Scroll down]  One of the most irritating things about the [plastic bag] ban was that, while stores could still provide bags, consumers had to pay a dime per bag if they wanted them.  In other words, consumers were suddenly being taxed for a harmless product they once received for free.  At the same time, the bags we were now forced to pay for also became more fragile and, therefore, were harder to put to secondary uses.  They usually ripped by the time they entered the house.  The real problem, though, was that the reusable bags that replaced plastic and paper were disease vectors — something that all the politicians banning them knew or should have known.  San Francisco (of course) was the American city that led the way on plastic bag bans in 2007.  Not long afterward, a study revealed that the bans increased by 50% the number of deaths from food-borne illnesses.

Those Plastic Bag Bans Aren't Looking So Good Right Now.  Bans on single-use plastic bags were all the rage over the past few years, particularly on the west coast and in the northeast.  We were told that those bags were ruining the planet and we would stave off the end of the world if we outlawed them.  As a replacement, we were instructed to purchase reusable cloth bags and bring them with us to the stores.  But now that the coronavirus is stalking the streets, things have changed.  The cloth bags have porous surfaces that the virus can cling to and remain dangerous for up to three to five days.  With that in mind, multiple states have now postponed their upcoming rules or canceled enforcement of bans that were already on the books.

The plastic waste in the oceans comes from the poorest countries, not the wealthiest.
Indonesia's Citarum:  The World's Most Polluted River.  Suratmo, a fisherman living on the banks of the Citarum River, could only laugh softly when asked about his catch today.  He replied that he could no longer be called a fisherman.  For the last five years, his income has no longer come from catching fish, but fishing used items such as glass bottles from the mountains of garbage in what is often called the world's most polluted river.  Yes, Suratmo can no longer be called a fisherman — he is now a garbage collector.  Every day, no less than 20,000 tons of waste and 340,000 tons of wastewater, mostly from 2,000 textile factories, are disposed directly into the once clear and pristine waterways of the Citarum River.  No wonder the fish are largely gone in the third-biggest river in Java.

After banning plastic grocery bags for the environment, some states are liberating them over coronavirus concerns.  Massachusetts joined New Hampshire in banning reusable bags and freeing one-use plastic and paper grocery bags over concerns that reusable bags were threatening public health during the coronavirus epidemic.  New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, banned reusable grocery bags and explicitly cited concerns that they could help spread the virus currently ravaging countries around the globe.  "Our grocery store workers are on the front lines of COVID-19, working around the clock to keep New Hampshire families fed," said Sununu in a statement.  "With identified community transmission, it is important that shoppers keep their reusable bags at home given the potential risk to baggers, grocers and customers."  On Wednesday [3/25/2020], Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker also liberated plastic bags from their dishonorable exile.

New policy for personal bag use in some local grocery stores.  Checking out at a grocery is when some feel worries diminish but could it be where your virus worries begin?  A new study from the New England Journal of Medicine says the coronavirus can live up to 24 hours on cardboard and much longer on plastic.  "As it turns out the coronavirus can it looks like can live on the grocery bags that are made of plastic which they are, for 3 days.  Again, probably a reason to not take anything from an outside environment into the grocery store and then back home," says Dr. Werner[.]  The idea is simple[:]  any germs or virus at your home live on surfaces there, the bags pick them up and then tag along to the next location, the grocery store.  Giant Foods say the bags are allowed, but the cashiers or baggers will not touch your reusable bags, you'll have to bag your own groceries.

The Plastic Bag Ban Backfires.  New York's environmentalists have terrible timing.  The statewide ban on single-use plastic bags took effect on March 1, the same day New York confirmed its first case of coronavirus.  To protect the public, officials in the Empire State and elsewhere should immediately suspend their plastic bag bans.  Much remains unknown about Covid-19, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it "may remain viable for hours to days on surfaces made from a variety of materials."

Life in the Time of Wuhan.  For many decades big government proponents have worked and spent fortunes of tax revenues to wean Americans from their cars and onto public transportation, and it is now an "obvious fact that crowded subways and buses are the worst thing in the face of a new, extremely contagious respiratory virus."  The same can be said of the misguided (indeed, in my view, idiotic) war on plastic bags by blue state and local politicians.

Greening Our Way to Infection.  The COVID-19 outbreak is giving new meaning to those "sustainable" shopping bags that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public.  These reusable tote bags can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses — and spread the viruses throughout the store.  Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens.  In New York State, a new law took effect this month banning single-use plastic bags in most retail businesses, and this week Democratic state legislators advanced a bill that would force coffee shops to accept consumers' reusable cups — a practice that Starbucks and other chains have wisely suspended to avoid spreading the COVID-19 virus.

Using tote bags instead of plastic could help spread the coronavirus.  The COVID-19 outbreak is giving new meaning to those "sustainable" shopping bags that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public.  These reusable tote bags can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses — and spread the viruses throughout the store.  Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens.  In New York state, a new law took effect this month banning single-use plastic bags in most retail businesses, and this week Democratic state legislators advanced a bill that would force coffee shops to accept consumers' reusable cups — a practice that Starbucks and other chains have wisely suspended to avoid spreading the COVID-19 virus.

After the Rains.  This is a common occurrence in Ghana after rainfall.  [Video clip]

The Editor says...
The video clip shows a river of garbage.  Apparently the local creek bed serves as the community dumpster.  So that's where some of the plastic in the ocean comes from.  This is more evidence that the poorest counties in the world, not the wealthiest, are the worst polluters.  Here is another example:

Men filmed dumping garbage into River.  Vishwamitri River, Vadodara, India.  [Video clip]

New York plastic bag ban takes effect, customers 'not happy'.  The New York law banning so-called single-use plastic bags took effect Sunday [3/1/2020], with some customers balking at the new rules.  Mayor Bill de Blasio's office celebrated the law with a graphic reading "buh bye."  "Sending a big farewell to single-use plastic bags," the mayor's office wrote.  "We've moved on to eco-friendly reusable bags and we're not looking back."

New Yorkers rankled on first day of statewide plastic-bag ban.  New Yorkers were forced to begin grappling with a new shopping reality Sunday as the state's ban on plastic shopping bags kicked in — and not many people were happy about it.  "I think it's ridiculous," letter-carrier Scott Kimmel, 56, said while shopping at the Whitestone Target in College Point, Queens.  "I understand about 'conserve, take care of the environment,' but c'mon!"  About half the shoppers seen by The Post on the first day of the bag ban, including Kimmel, were compensating by bringing their own bags from home, while another quarter opted to just go bagless rather than pay the 5-cent paper-bag fee allowed under the law, and the remaining 25 percent coughed up the nickel charge per bag.

New York Bans Plastic Bags, Threatens $500 Fines.  New York will ban single-use plastic bags in stores starting March 1.  The state's ban, which was passed last year by the state legislature, will impact both grocery and department stores.  New York is the third state to introduce a plastic bag ban, joining California and Oregon, as a way to curb the amount of plastic going to landfills.

The Perverse Panic over Plastic.  [Scroll down]  After painstakingly analyzing debris in the north central Pacific Ocean, where converging currents create the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a team of scientists from four continents reported in 2018 that more than half the plastic came from fishing boats — mostly discarded nets and other gear.  These discards are also the greatest threat to marine animals, who die not from plastic bags but from getting entangled in the nets.  Another study, published last year by Canadian and South African researchers, traced the origins of plastic bottles that had washed up on the shore of the aptly named Inaccessible Island, an uninhabited landmass in the middle of the southern Atlantic Ocean.  More than 80 percent of the bottles came from China and must have been tossed off boats from Asia traversing the Atlantic.  Some plastic discarded on land does end up in the ocean, but very little of it comes from consumers in the United States or Europe.  Most of the labels on the plastic packaging analyzed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch came from Asia, the greatest source of what researchers call "mismanaged waste."

Joe Biden, The Democrats' Bag Man.  Joe Biden says he is 100% in favor of banning plastic bags in the U.S. At this point, it might be better to ask Biden and the rest of the Democrats running for president what they would allow Americans to have.  It would likely be a short list.  Biden's position on the issue was revealed last week at an Iowa campaign stop when a woman asked him about his "focus."  "In Kenya, we are trying to clean the environment, no plastic bags, you go with your own bags," she said.  Biden's response:  "I agree with you 100%.  We should not be allowing plastic, and what we should do is phasing it out."

10 questions to ask your climate alarmist friends.  [#6] Do you support banning plastics?  Think beyond plastic straws here.  Plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, have made many now commonplace items cheaper, more accessible, and more beneficial to human life than ever.  This is particularly critical in the medical field.  Imagine what a typical day in America would look like without water filters, plumbing pipes, circuit boards, medical machines like MRIs, artery stents, prosthetic limbs, sterile IV bags and tubes, syringes, disposable gloves, cochlear implants, contact lenses, adhesive tape, synthetic fabrics such as polyester and nylon, building insulation, and most of the parts for cars, airplanes, trains, ships, and even satellites.  And this is just a short list!  Banning fossil fuels means banning all of these essential items — or at the very least making them prohibitively expensive.

Minneapolis City Council passes ordinance requiring 5 cent fee on one-time use grocery bags.  Minneapolis residents and visitors will see a change when they visit a grocery store in the city following the City Council's passing of the "Bring Your Own Bag" ordinance.  The ordinance, which places a 5 cent fee on each paper or plastic bag shoppers carry out of a store, was passed at the council's Friday [11/22/2019] meeting.

Neuston, we have a problem!
The Ocean Cleanup struggles to prove it will not harm sea life.  I am deeply concerned that a project intending to collect plastic from the ocean's surface, known as The Ocean Cleanup, will sweep up countless floating marine animals — collectively called the neuston — potentially putting whole ecosystems at risk.

China dumped 27 percent more trash into the ocean in 2018.  China dumped a total of 200.7 million cubic meters (7,087.6 million cubic feet) of waste into its coastal waters in 2018, a 27 percent rise on the previous year and the highest level in at least a decade, the country's environment ministry said on Tuesday [10/29/2019].  The majority of the waste was dumped in the delta regions of the Yangtze and Pearl rivers, both major industrial zones on China's eastern coast, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) said.

Why Do Environmentalists Seem Determined To Torment, Rather Than Convince?  [Scroll down]  Now, the lines are much slower because bagging has become an ordeal thanks to the "Earth-protecting" plastic-bag ban the state had passed a few years ago.  Consider what happens now.  Store employees can't simply place your food in the needed bags.  They have to ask how many bags shoppers want to buy.  "As many as needed," I always say, given that I don't really care if the $150 transaction costs another buck.  It's basically just another tax we pay to live in a former paradise.  But that's not how it works now.  The employees dispense bags parsimoniously.  Who can blame cashiers given the guff they might get if they sell someone an unnecessary bag?  Bagging used to be an artform, where baggers carefully separated, say, the eggs from the bottle of Chivas Regal.  Now they cram as much stuff as possible in a single bag.  Heaven forbid you get stuck behind someone who pulls out a trove of bacteria-laden, reusable sacks.

California bans hotels from using tiny plastic bottles.  Hotels in California will have to stop giving guests small plastic shampoo bottles under a new law.  Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday [10/9/2019] he had signed a law banning hotels from giving guests plastic bottles filled with shampoo, conditioner or soap.  The law takes effect in 2023 for hotels with more than 50 rooms and 2024 for hotels with less than 50 rooms.  Violators could be fined $500 for a first offense and $2,000 for subsequent violations.  The law follows similar actions by some of the world's largest hotel chains.

Study: Chinese Cargo Ships Dump 73% of Trash in Atlantic Ocean.  International researchers estimate that as much as 73 percent of the garbage in the Atlantic Ocean originates from Chinese merchant vessels, Canada's National Post reported on Tuesday [10/1/2019].  Researchers from Canada and South Africa studied waste washed up on the beaches of Inaccessible Island, an island in the heart of the southern Atlantic Ocean, on a series of trips that began in 1984.  Nearly three-quarters of the trash they sifted through originated in Asia, produced by China.  The research challenges long assumptions that plastic debris at sea primarily originates on land.

90% Of Plastic Waste Polluting The Planet Comes From Asia and Africa.  You have to wonder, if climate change cultists really want to help the planet, then why do they focus all their energy on berating America, instead of focusing on the real polluters, which are China, India, and Africa?

Why Plastic Straws Are Actually Better For The Planet Than Paper Straws.  Do not be convinced you are saving the planet by drinking out of a terrible straw.  Plastic straws are simply not killing the planet, and science just can't stop proving it.  While it may seem like merely a minor inconvenience to drink out of a mushy paper straw or sippy-cup lid, bans on straws have become the trendiest piece of legislation in the United States.  Virtue-signaling lefties rejoice in what they consider to be "planet-saving" bans on useful items that children and disabled people need daily.  The bans are not based at all on science and facts about ocean pollution but entirely reliant on activist emotion intent on making people think the world is on the verge of ending.

Pope Francis Bans Plastic From The Vatican To 'Save The Environment'.  Pope Francis has placed a ban on plastic in Vatican City State to 'stand in solidarity' with environmentalists, according to reports.  The Pontiff made the announcement while aboard the papal plane during a long-haul flight back from a trip to Africa.  The Catholic leader said he was disturbed by a conversation with chaplains and fishermen who described how they had found six tons of plastic over the course of a few months.

The Editor says...
The environmental policy for an entire country should not be based upon the dubious anecdotes in an alleged conversation with a purported fisherman.

If Democrats Cared About the Environment, They'd Talk About China.  Am I just seeing things?  Or are all the "climate crisis solutions" proposed by the Democrats designed to cause maximum pain to ordinary people, and almost none to wealthy elites?  Progressives almost seem to take joy in inconveniencing the masses for no reason.  Take the plastic straw ban, for example.  Even National Geographic — hardly an anti-environmentalist publication — admits that plastic straws comprise just 0.025 percent of the plastic in the oceans.  Contrast the minimal impact of plastic straws with the extraordinary impact of China, and, by extension, global free trade.  China, alone, produces around a third of the ocean's plastic waste.  China's CO2 emissions are greater than the U.S. and Europe combined, and keep going up.

Stone-Age Democrats Are Crazy With the Heat.  How these reckless clowns could persuade even 10 percent of voters to support them in a general election is a disturbingly sad commentary on the state of our electorate.  Each candidate was more ridiculous than the next.  It was a painful spectacle to endure.  Kamala Harris seemed to realize how ridiculous she sounded when she said she would favor banning plastic straws.  Saying something has to be done, she descended into inane laughter about the difficulty in using paper straws.  Seriously?  This is what animates them today?

Kamala Harris wants to ban plastic straws but says paper straws [are] too 'flimsy'.  Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said Wednesday [9/4/2019] during a CNN climate change forum that the U.S. should ban plastic straws while answering a question about curbing the country's reliance on single-use plastics.  But Harris also said she wants to "encourage innovation" around paper straws that break too often.  "I think we should, yes.  I mean.  Look, I'm going to be honest.  It's really difficult out of — drink out of a paper straw — like, if you don't gulp it down immediately, it starts to bend, and then the little thing catches it," Harris says, making a snapping motion with her hands and laughing.

The Editor says...
When a politician has to announce, "I'm going to be honest," that's an indication that honesty is unusual.

No One Needs A Straw.  The fight over banning single-use plastic straws has become the latest sticking point in the culture war between liberals and conservatives, with left-wing activists passing laws to ban plastic straws and conservatives mocking them for it, flashing pictures of themselves sipping drinks through the plastic utensil in cities that have banned the product to "own the libs."  The Trump campaign has even started selling packs of plastic straws.  Supporters can buy the "Trump Straw" for $1.50 apiece.  The product has become wildly popular among fans, with the campaign reporting nearly half a million dollars in sales.

Banning Plastic Straws — Just Another Climate Scam Strawman.  Here's the truth about the problem with plastic in our oceans:  The United States and Europe COMBINED produce about 2% of the total waste, with the U.S. producing about half of that, or 1%. Meanwhile, fully 82% of the waste emanates from Asia and its rapidly-expanding economies, with the remaining 16% coming from Africa, South America and the rest of the world.  In other words, the plastics issue is just like the carbon emissions issue:  The United States could eliminate ALL use of plastics and not even make a small dent in terms of solving the problem.

San Francisco airport announces ban on sales of plastic water bottles.  The days of picking up a plastic bottle of water to stay hydrated during a long flight will soon be over for people flying out of San Francisco's International Airport (SFO).  The airport, which restricted the distribution of single-use plastic straws when the city law went into effect in July, is now banning convenience shops, restaurants and vending machines from selling plastic water bottles.  Starting 20 August, only water in glass, recycled aluminum, or certified compostable materials can be sold.

From my cold, dead lips!

Trump campaign's plastic straws selling like hotcakes.  The Trump reelection campaign has raised more than $200,000 by selling about 140,000 plastic straws in just four days, campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted Monday [7/22/2019]. "More than half of all Straw purchasers were BRAND NEW small dollar donors," Mr. Parscale tweeted.  "Amazing!"  He began promoting the plastic straws on Thursday.  "Now you can finally be free from liberal paper straws," he said.  "I'm so over paper straws, and I'm sure you are too.  Much like most liberal ideas, paper straws don't work and they fall apart instantly.  That's why we just launched our latest product — Official Trump Straws.  Now you can finally be free from liberal paper straws that fall apart within minutes and ruin your drink."

Trump Campaign Sells $15 Dollar Pack Of Plastic Straws.  Look, the guy cracks me up and I won't apologize for it.  Case in point, the Trump campaign is selling a 10-pack of recyclable plastic straws, laser-engraved with the word "TRUMP" because, as the campaign tells it, "liberal paper straws don't work."

Update:
Plastic "Trump straws" sell out almost immediately.  While the subject of plastic waste that doesn't decompose winding up in our oceans and landfills is a serious one, not all of the proposals to address the situation are as serious as others.  As AP noted, the President was asked about a ban on plastic straws and he responded by saying that it makes little sense to ban them when we're not banning all of the other, larger plastic products that are also not recycled.  Not long after that, somebody saw a fundraising opportunity and plastic "Trump straws" were on sale at the President's fundraising site.  Charging a dollar and a half each for what is essentially just a plain, red plastic straw with Trump's name emblazoned on the side might not sound like much of a bargain, but that obviously wasn't the point.  The President was capitalizing on pushback against a liberal idea that seemed excessively intrusive while producing little in the way of measurable results.  So how did it work out?  The straws sold out in a matter of days.

New Hampshire Senate Rejects Plastic Bag, Soda Straw Bans.  New Hampshire will not ban thin-film plastic bags or limit restaurants' use of plastic soda straws this year.  The state Senate decided not to pass two measures which would have prohibited grocery stores, restaurants, and retailers from providing single-use plastic carry-out bags to customers and would have prevented restaurants and other food vendors from providing plastic straws unless specifically requested.

McDonald's and Burger King are facing calls to scrap plastic toys in kids' meal deals.  The plastic toys given away with children's fast food meals are under fire.  McDonald's and Burger King are the target of a petition started by two British school children who criticize the companies for giving away the toys that they say are put in the trash after only being used briefly.  McDonald's Happy Meal and Burger King's Kids' Meal include a main meal, side, drink and a toy, which is often linked to movie releases.

Metal drinking straw fatally impales woman through her eye after fall.  A retired jockey died when she fell onto an eco-friendly metal drinking straw which impaled her eye, an inquest heard.  Elena Struthers-Gardner, 60, who was known as "Lena," suffered brain injuries in the accident at her home in Broadstone, England.  She was carrying a mason-jar style drinking glass with a screw-top lid in her kitchen when she collapsed.  The 10-inch stainless steel straw entered her left eye socket and pierced her brain.  Her death has led to a coroner warning that metal drinking straws should never be used with a lid that fixes them in place, and "great care should be taken" while using them.

D.C. Bans Plastic Straws, Fines Up to $800.  The District of Columbia's ban on plastic straws took effect on Monday [7/1/2019], putting in place fines that range from $100 to $800 if plastic straws are discovered in unannounced D.C. Department of Energy and Environment inspections at restaurants and coffee shops.  "Businesses have been warned since the ban was technically enforced on Jan. 1, 2019, but no real punishments were put in place," the Washington Examiner reported.

Is This Shopping Bag More 'Eco Friendly' Than Plastic?  Only If It's Used 20,000 Times.  Plastic is the eco-activists' favored demon of the moment.  Policymakers can't get enough of banning plastic consumer items.  But the bans are worse than useless.  They are counterproductive.  California leads the world in virtue signaling, having outlawed single-use plastics bags, as well as plastic straws.  Plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and soap handed out by hotels might be the next items prohibited under California law, if lawmakers don't ban plastics utensils first.  Other states have rushed to enact bans, including Vermont, New York, and Hawaii (which has a de facto statewide ban due to multiple county bans). More cities than can be easily counted have either already or are in the process of outlawing various plastics.

Sorry, banning plastic bags won't save our planet.  Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to reduce plastic pollution, which will include a ban on single-use plastics as early as 2021.  This is laudable:  plastics clog drains and cause floods, litter nature and kill animals and birds.  Of course, plastic also makes our lives better in a myriad of ways.  In just four decades, plastic packaging has become ubiquitous because it keeps everything from cereals to juice fresher and reduces transportation losses, while one-use plastics in the medical sector have made syringes, pill bottles and diagnostic equipment more safe.  Going without disposable plastic entirely would leave us worse off, so we need to tackle the problems without losing all of the benefits.

Here comes another global disaster!  The microplastic scare has all the earmarks of the global warming scare.  Its effects are hidden to all but experts.  Its chief culprits are elsewhere — centered, in this case, in the Philippines and southeast Asia generally (and in Canada, who, until very recently, shipped its garbage to the Philippines). Its prescriptions for Americans are symbolic rather than effective.  And ultimately, it's going to cost lots of money.  Trust me on this.

Death Toll from Plastic Straws in California Is Now Zero.  After then-California Governor Jerry Brown signed the nation's most restrictive statewide anti-plastic-straw law in 2018, experts predicted that it would enable the state to completely eliminate plastic straw-related deaths in California.  And now in 2019, a new report shows that there have been zero plastic-straw-related deaths so far this year.

Recycling: America's False Religion.  Before climate change became a belief system in which humans are expected to perform penance for their sins against Gaia, recycling was the religion of many in the modern world. [...] Though recycling rarely makes economic sense and often burns up more fresh resources than would have been used in making new items, Americans recycled.  And recycled.  And recycle still.  Are we better off for it?  It can easily be argued we are worse off.  Our recycling obsessions have instigated a war on plastic that's inconvenienced consumers and cost them billions.  Recycling also helped create an environmental mess.  Roughly 90 percent of all plastic found in the oceans, says the Hemholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, is carried there by "the top 10 rivers with the highest loads" of plastic debris.  Eight of those rivers are in Asia, two are in Africa.  None are in the U.S.

Plastic straws, stirrers and Q-tips to be banned in England starting April 2020.  Plastic straws, stirrers and Q-tips will be banned in England starting in April of 2020, the government confirmed Wednesday [5/22/2019].  Environment officials estimated that 4.7 billion plastic straws, 316 million plastic stirrers and 1.8 billion plastic-stemmed cotton buds are used in the country each year.  "Urgent and decisive action is needed to tackle plastic pollution and protect our environment.  These items are often used for just a few minutes but take hundreds of years to break down, ending up in our seas and oceans and harming precious marine life," Environment Secretary Michael Gove said in a statement.

The Editor says...
They take "hundreds of years to break down?"  Really?  Show me a cotton swab or a plastic straw that's a hundred years old.  Incidentally, Q-TIPS.  is a registered trademark of Unilever, not just a common noun.

The bag police.  If left unchecked, politicians would allow America's Nanny State to grow to immeasurable proportions.  Government bureaucrats and elected officials believe they know better than we mere mortals when it comes to making personal choices about health care, child rearing, diet, smoking and countless other subjects.  The environment is another favorite vehicle for proponents of the Nanny State.  Straws, styrofoam and coffee pods have all been recently targeted by green groups.  Some jurisdictions have banned plastic shopping bags.  And if New Jersey legislators have their way, paper grocery bags would be outlawed, as well.

New Jersey Politician Wants To Ban All Bags — Paper or Plastic.  In August 2018, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have imposed a five-cent fee on both paper and plastic carryout bags, arguing that the legislation did not do enough to protect the Garden State's famed natural beauty.  "Single-use carryout bags — particularly plastic bags — represent a significant source of the litter that clutters our communities and mars New Jersey's beautiful shoreline and parks," wrote Murphy in his veto statement.  "Instituting a five-cent fee on single-use bags that only applies to certain retailers does not go far enough."  State legislators have clearly heard this message, floating proposals to ban not just plastic grocery bags, but all single-use bags — paper or plastic.

False flag environmentalism is dangerous for America and the world.  [Scroll down]  Forget the GWCC adult crowd when for years now a 9-year old boy, yes a 9-year old, is the one who began the ban-plastic-straw movement to the detriment of the global plastics industry.  We are repeatedly told the US is causing a tsunami of plastic straws littering our oceans, rivers and drinkable waterways.  That is false.  The World Economic Forum did analysis on the issue and found:  "That more than 8 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year.  Most of the plastic washed into the oceans, 90% of it come from just 10 rivers in Asia."  The US environmental movement has embraced letting a child destroy the plastics industry.  That is the epitome of today's global and US-based environmental movement.  Facts take a backseat if it pushes the GWCC story forward.

McDonald's customers slam 'soggy' eco-friendly straws: 'Paper straws and milk shakes don't go together'.  Customers of McDonald's in the U.K. are demanding the fast-food chain brings back plastic straws, claiming the new paper ones aren't fit for purpose.  Thirty thousand people have signed a petition to get rid of the new straws, which have been brought in over concerns about plastic pollution.  Many claim the paper ones are dissolving into their drinks and change the taste of the products.

California, Blinded By Plastic.  California, the Los Angeles Times recently reported, is building a "non-plastic future."  The state has outlawed or restricted single-use plastic bags, plastic drinking straws, and plastic cutlery.  Future targets: plastic detergent bottles, unattached caps on plastic bottles, and polystyrene containers (typically used to hold restaurant takeout orders), which more than 100 California cities have already banned.  Some legislators also want to ban travel-size shampoo bottles that hotels provide for guests.  Golden State consumers are schlepping groceries in their arms as if they've been sent backward to the pre-bag era, sucking on paper straws that quickly become sodden and useless, and smuggling plastic bags across the state line.

California may ban hotels from giving guests tiny bottles of shampoo, conditioner, lotion.  The bill would ban "lodging establishments", including hotels, motels, resorts, bed and breakfasts, and vacation rentals, from offering small plastic bottles holding 12 ounces or under of product in rooms or public spaces.  Instead, the establishments could offer "bulk dispensers" that could be used by a number of people.  The goal is to cut down on the amount of plastic containers thrown away by guests and operators.  The law wouldn't apply to nursing homes, hospitals, long-term rentals, or hosted rentals.

New York City Mayor de Blasio bans plasticware in city agencies — including schools, jails, and hospitals.  The mayor signed an executive order Thursday mandating the new guidelines.  The ban has exceptions for people with disabilities and for medical use or use during emergency preparedness.  Agencies will have 120 days to begin reducing their reliance on these items.  The ban will go into full effect at the start of 2020.  In a speech announcing the ban, de Blasio described plasticware items as "things we somehow got used to but we really don't need anymore."  He said the companies that make such products were "the villain here."  De Blasio said that this would cut the city's carbon emissions by 500 tons a year.

The Editor says...
Carbon dioxide is not carbon, and plastic forks do not emit carbon dioxide.  When you eat with a plastic fork, your mouth emits more CO2 than the fork.

California Plastic Bag Bans Spur 120 Percent Increase in Sales of Thicker Plastic Garbage Bags.  In March, New York became the second state to ban plastic bags — behind California, which banned them in 2016. Countless cities, towns, and counties have also either prohibited plastic bags or imposed fees or other restrictions on their use.  As always, New York's ban was justified as a way to protect the environment.  Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared that it will "reduce litter in our communities, protect our water and create a cleaner and greener New York for all."  Or maybe it won't.  Far from weening us off hazardous single-use plastics, these bans may actually be encouraging people to instead use thicker garbage bags or other less-than-green alternatives.

Drastic Plastic.  [Scroll down]  Let's go to Los Angeles magazine for guidance here:  "Reusable Tote Bags Are the Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled."  Hmm.  Why?  Because the bottom of the bags accrues a sticky grot of leaked meat juices and fructose and breeds nasty bugs that give you the gut-rot for two days?  Because you always forget them and feel as if you have sinned when you don't have a sustainable-transport option?  All that, yes, but mostly this:  "The production and distribution of single-use plastic bags produces less carbon and other pollution than paper bags, recycled plastic totes, and cotton totes.  To achieve the same emissions-per-use ratio as a disposable plastic bag, you'd have to use your cotton tote 131 times just to break even."

Hawaii and New Jersey May Enact the Nation's Toughest Bans On Plastic.  Lawmakers in New Jersey and Hawaii are looking to make the lives of their voters a whole lot harder by proposing an extreme statewide ban on plastics and Styrofoam.  Both of the states ban proposals are making their way through their respective state senates.  While New Jersey's bill would ban plastic bags, plastic straws, and Styrofoam food and beverage containers, Hawaii's plan goes a bit further by adding plastic drinking bottles, utensils, stirring sticks, and garbage bags.  The tropical state will also ban "nearly all plastic from fast food and full-service restaurants," according to Fox News.

Banning Plastic Bags Will Hurt Businesses, Consumers.  Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo hopes to gain some green points by passing a statewide plastic shopping bag ban.  He seems oblivious to the serious adverse impacts on small businesses and their employees, as well as on consumers and the environment.  There are 30 companies in New York State that manufacture plastic bags with 1,500 employees that will suffer if the ban takes effect, a representative for the Business Council of New York State pointed out in the New York Business Journal.  There are also companies with employees that distribute these bags, many or all of which will be out of business thanks to Cuomo and his political allies.

Science Shows that it's Not Really Green to Ban Plastic Bags.  First, consider the public health profile of reusable cloth bags.  A study conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona and California's Loma Linda University in 2010 measured bacteria in a sample of reusable bags, finding many containing dangerous ones, such as coliform (found in half the bags) and E. coli (found in 12 percent of bags).  Pathogens can develop from leaky meat packages as well as unwashed produce.  And consumers reported that they rarely wash the bags, according to the study.  The consequences of such contamination can be serious.  After San Francisco banned plastic bags in 2007, the number of emergency room visits for bacterial related diseases increased, according to a study conducted five years later by legal scholars at George Mason University and the University of Pennsylvania.  "ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect," the study explained.  "Relative to other counties, ER admissions increases by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase."

Berkeley Restaurants To Charge Fee For Disposable Cups.  One California city is pushing residents to switch to reusable cups by imposing a new tax.  On Wednesday, the Berkeley City Council voted unanimously to force restaurants and coffee shops to charge a 25-cent fee for their disposable cups.  The Democrat controlled city council is hopeful the tax will reduce the city's paper and plastic waste, and encourage people to bring their own reusable cups while dining out.  Restaurants will reportedly be allowed to keep the funds raised from the fees to be used however they want.

Don't Ban Plastic Bags!  Like dozen towns and cities in Massachusetts and other states, Boston recently enacted a ban on plastic shopping bags.  It went into effect December 14, 2018.  It was a relatively easy vote, because "evil" plastic bags have received extensive bad press that generally ignores important facts.  The same holds true in other jurisdictions, especially those controlled by Democrats who a generation ago cared about American workers, but today too often subjugate the needs of blue collar families to demands by college educated and environmentalist elites, and even noisy grade school kids.

Paper straw demand up 5,000 percent since plastic ban.  2018 was, without a doubt, the year plastic straws died.  The war picked up steam starting in 2015 after a YouTube video surfaced of a plastic straw being removed from the nostril of a sea turtle.  Ever since then, big companies such as McDonald's, Starbucks, Goldman Sachs Group and even the city of Seattle have all taken measures to slowly outlaw them[,] or ban them completely.  What's more, all of them have turned to one company — Aardvark, the first original paper straw maker in America — to discuss using paper straws instead.

Straw Ban Straw Man.  When Seattle outlawed single-use plastic straws in September 2017, the decision drew snickers from spectators as the latest, silliest example of nanny state excess — and one that could happen only in the famously progressive city.  But by the time the ban went into effect in July 2018, straw bans had taken the world by storm.  Vancouver, British Columbia, banned straws in May.  Active efforts are underway to do the same in San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; Washington, D.C.; and New York City.  California is mulling a bill that would prohibit restaurateurs from offering their patrons unsolicited plastic straws, and Hawaii considered a bill this year that would have outlawed both businesses and individuals from selling or even giving out straws free of charge.

Kenya believe it?
Islanders In Kenya Build Recycled Plastic Boat To Highlight Pollution.  Kenyan islanders have built a boat made entirely of recycled plastic collected during clean-ups of the ocean to highlight the growing menace of plastic waste that ends up in the sea.

Half-Marathon Ditches Plastic Water Bottles in Favor of Edible Water Pouches.  Remember when news outlets were reporting on these funny-looking blobs back in 2017?  Well, they will now be replacing plastic water bottles at a half-marathon in England.  Marathons are notorious for generating massive amounts of plastic waste through their excessive utilization of single-use water bottles — so as a means of helping out the environment, the Ooho! water pouches will be handed out to runners during the Harrow half-marathon in London on Sunday [9/16/2018].

Kroger's Feel-Good Ban On Plastic Bags Is Worse Than Pointless.  Kroger, America's largest grocery store chain, announced Wednesday that it would ban plastic bags at the checkout lanes in all its stores by 2025.  This comes after a multitude of studies have found that replacements for those bags are often far worse for the environment, not to mention more expensive for consumers.

Kroger to phase out plastic bags at all stores.  The nation's largest grocery chain has begun to phase out the use of plastic bags as more Americans grow uncomfortable with their impact on the environment.

A Tale of Three Cities.  San Francisco is being overrun with the homeless and illegal aliens due to its sanctuary city status and virtue-signaling leadership.  The streets are littered with human feces, hypodermic needles, and syringes, turning the once beautiful "City by the Bay" into a cesspool.  What's the response of San Francisco leaders?  Banning plastic straws.

'We Have to Regulate Every Aspect of People's Lives'.  A Santa Barbara city councilman inadvertently let slip the primary purpose of progressivism in 21st century America.  The city recently criminalized the use of plastic straws.  Speaking to that issue, Councilman Jesse Dominguez said, "Unfortunately, common sense is just not common.  We have to regulate every aspect of people's lives."  Got that?  "We" are smarter than you and know what's best for you better than you do.  Perhaps realizing that his comment revealed a fundamental truth of progressive thought, Dominguez tried to walk back his gaffe: [...]

The Countries Polluting The Oceans The Most.  A team of researchers in the United States and Australia led by Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia, analyzed plastic waste levels in the world's oceans.  They found that China and Indonesia are the top sources of plastic bottles, bags and other rubbish clogging up global sea lanes.  Together, both nations account for more than a third of plastic detritus in global waters, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.  In 2010, 8.8 million metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste in the ocean was traced back to China while 3.2 million metric tons came from Indonesia.

San Francisco:  The City of Bans.  On July 19, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to forbid restaurants, bars, and convenience stores from handing out or selling straws.  The city joins a growing list of progressive enclaves to do so, including Seattle, Malibu, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara.  Most cities impose a fine for such verboten behavior.  But Santa Barbara's ordinance, which goes into effect next year, imposes a fine of up to $1,000 and imprisonment of up to six months.  [...] What's the official point of it?  It's designed to cut down on the plastic waste that ends up in the ocean.  But as Reason's Christian Britschgi recently reported, plastic straws "account for about 2,000 tons of the 9 million tons of plastic that are entering the ocean each year."  That's a tiny amount.  And he noted that Starbucks, which recently announced that it will stop using straws, is introducing new lids that actually use more plastic than the old ones.  There's no gain and activists are complaining about the elimination of a product that helps many disabled people drink from cups.

The absurd hysteria around plastic straws.  Taking away freedom for nothing in return is now a specialty of the environmental movement.  After our environment got cleaner — thanks to technological innovation and some useful government-imposed requirements (like scrubbers in smokestacks and pollution limits on cars) — the zealots moved on to demand bans on pipeline construction, mining and oil drilling.  They require lots of pointless recycling (though often garbage you separate is never recycled) and all sorts of feel-good policies that make no real difference.

Disabled People are Decrying the Plastic Straw Ban.  While many environmentalists are hailing decisions to do away with plastic straws in states, cities and big companies, advocates are pointing out that such bans will make life all the more difficult for the disabled. [...] Unfortunately, for many people affected with physical impairments, the new ban in San Francisco does not explicitly factor in disability access, but it does add that "strict compliance" with the new ordinance is not required if it should "interfere with accommodating for any person's medical needs."

Activists push for statewide plastic straw and styrofoam food container ban.  Activists from Environment California and the Surfrider Foundation gathered at Goleta Beach Park Friday morning to push legislators to pass statewide measures to protect California's coastline.  The laws would address plastic straws and food packaging in the state of California.  Julia McLaughlin works with environment California's Isla Vista office and helped organize the event.  She says the organization has been working all summer to advocate for a state-wide ban on polystyrene, more commonly known as styrofoam, as well as limiting single-use plastic straw consumption.

The Road to Hell is Paved With... Straws?  In parts of California now, a person can go into a public park, shoot up heroin, throw the used syringe on the sidewalk, walk into the street and then poop in the highway — all without consequence. [...] The city council in Santa Barbara, Calif. voted this past week to throw restaurant employees in jail for up to six months if they give plastic straws to customers.  San Francisco is following suit, as are other progressive meccas like Seattle.  A national chain of progressive homeless shelters and communal bathrooms operating under the name Starbucks is banning straws, too.  You can get plastic cups with plastic lids, but straws are forbidden.

Walsh: Mankind Will Be Extinct Within 50 Years If We Do Not Abolish Plastic Straws.  The Board of Supervisors in San Francisco passed an ordinance yesterday banning straws from restaurants and bars in the city.  San Francisco, like Seattle, will now be a straw-free safe haven.  The refugee fleeing straw persecution can come to the city and live in paradise and contract hepatitis when he steps on a used heroin needle.  But even then he will rejoice, for he is liberated from straws.  Many cities and corporations are following suit.  Another city in California will now hand out possible jail sentences to straw dealers.  15 seconds ago nobody worried about straws.  Now there is a straw crisis and an anti-straw movement to answer it.  Ordinances are being passed.  Laws are being written.

The Editor says...
If plastic straws were made of Polonium-210 or Strontium-90, I could see how he might be right.  But really, it's just plastic!

San Francisco approves measure to ban plastic straws.  San Francisco supervisors have unanimously approved a ban on plastic straws and takeout containers treated with fluorinated chemicals.  The vote Tuesday [7/24/2018] followed a ban on plastic straws and stirrers that took effect in Seattle this month.  The San Francisco legislation requires a second vote next week.  The legislation also makes napkins and utensils with takeout or delivery available only on request unless there is a self-serve station.

Starbucks Bans Plastic Straws, Winds Up Using More Plastic.  Not to be outdone by busybody legislators, Starbucks, the nation's largest food and drink retailer, announced on Monday [7/9/2018] that it would be going strawless.  "This is a significant milestone to achieve our global aspiration of sustainable coffee, served to our customers in more sustainable ways," said Starbucks Kevin Johnson CEO in a press release announcing the move.  The coffee giant says that by 2020 it hopes to have eliminated all single-use plastic straws at its 28,000 stores worldwide.  It will now top all its cold drinks with fancy new strawless lids that the company currently serves with its cold brew nitro coffees. [...] Yet missing from this fanfare was the inconvenient fact that by ditching plastic straws, Starbucks will actually be increasing its plastic use.  As it turns out, the new nitro lids that Starbucks is leaning on to replace straws are made up of more plastic than the company's current lid/straw combination.

Stossel:  Plastic Straw Myths.  Plastic pollution in the ocean is a real problem, but only about 1 percent of it comes from the U.S.  Of that 1 percent, only a tiny fraction comes from plastic straws.  How can that be?  Celebrities tell us Americans use 500 million plastic straws every day.  "Polluting water and killing sea life," according to actor Adrian Grenier.  The 500 million number is repeatedly used by the media.  But it comes from a nine-year-old's school project.  The real number is much less — closer to 175 million.

Plastic Straw Feel-Goodery.  Teachers here recently put children up to sending a letter to this newspaper proclaiming that "plastic straws are toxic and are destroying our planet" because they wind up in the oceans.  The letter asked Aspen to ban them. [...] Aspen Skiing Co. also has jumped on the plastic bandwagon.  Always on the lookout for a cheap gesture to signal its virtuous (or is it virtual?) greenness, their marketing gurus boast of banning plastic straws in their restaurants.  They evidently think this little plastic straw ban buys them green indulgences to consume gigawatts of electricity generated by burning fossil fuels (elsewhere of course) to haul people up snowy hills so that they can slide back down on plastic skis, over and over, till they get cold and sit by a fossil fuel fireplace before burning barrels of fossil fuel to fly home.

Starbucks' Straw Ban Won't Help The Planet, But Will Hurt The Disabled.  Why have straws become the bête noire of the green lobby and progressive CEOs?  Because some straws end up in the ocean.  We'll concede that polluting the oceans with plastic is bad.  But environmentalists aggressively pushing this straw ban are using phony statistics while ignoring the real problem.  Almost every story on banning plastic straws cites the same statistic — that Americans use 500 million straws a day — which is based on a 9-year-old's "research" project he did in 2011. (A more reliable estimate is 175 million.)  Whatever the number, straw bans in the U.S. will have virtually no impact on the world's plastic pollution problem.  Not only do straws represent a tiny portion of plastic waste that ends up in the ocean, but the U.S. itself accounts for less than 1% of the marine plastic in the world's oceans, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Science.  Europe's coastal countries, by contrast, account for almost 3%.  Just five countries — China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka — are responsible for more than half of the plastic entering the ocean each year.

Starbucks eliminating plastic straws from all stores, introduces adult 'sippy cup'.  The coffee company announced Monday that it will phase out plastic straws from all of its stores by 2020.  The changes will help Starbucks eliminate more than 1 billion plastic straws per year, the company said.  Plastic straws contribute to ocean pollution and pose a danger to marine life.  Some governments have begun banning them.

The Editor says...
What fraction of the straws from an urban coffee shop end up in the ocean?  One in a million?  One in a hundred million?  The drive to eliminate plastic straws and bags is all about impeding capitalism.  Nothing more, nothing less.  The same can be said of environmentalism as a whole.

Banning plastic straws is more scam than science.  Seattle just became the first US city to impose the trendy ban, and New York may soon follow suit, with Mayor Bill de Blasio backing an anti-straw City Council bill.  But even a national ban wouldn't dent worldwide plastic output.  Nor does any serious research justify targeting straws:  The oft-cited figure that Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day comes from a survey conducted by a 9-year-old.  Even ban proponents admit the cause is a con:  "Our straw campaign is not really about straws," Dune Ives, executive director of the outfit that pushed hardest for Seattle's ban, told Vox.  "It's about pointing out how prevalent single-use plastics are in our lives."

Seattle passes citywide law based largely on the research of a 9-year-old.  Seattle has made it official:  It is now the first major U.S. city to ban plastic drinking straws.  As it turns out, the law, which includes a fine of $250 for all violators, is based largely on the unofficial research of a nine-year-old boy.  Probably not the best basis for sound legislation, but what do I know?  The ban, which went into effect Sunday, is an "environmentally friendly move that leaders hope will spark a nationwide conversation about small, everyday changes that people can make to protect the planet."  Or so says the Washington Post.

Seattle bans plastic straws, utensils, becoming first major US city to do so.  Seattle has officially become the first major U.S. city to ban restaurants from giving plastic straws and utensils to customers in an effort to help the environment.  Since July 1, restaurants in the Emerald City are barred from providing customers plastic straws, cocktail picks or utensils unless someone specifically requests one.  In that case, the customer should be given a compostable option, according to Seattle Public Utilities.  With 5,000 food service providers in the area, Seattle is the first major city in the U.S. to enact such a ban, KIRO-TV reported.

Plastic Straws Aren't the Problem.  Straws make up a trifling percentage of the world's plastic products, and campaigns to eliminate them will not only be ineffective, but could distract from far more useful efforts.  The anti-straw movement took off in 2015, after a video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose went viral.  Campaigns soon followed, with activists often citing studies of the growing ocean plastics problem.  Intense media interest in the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a floating, France-sized gyre of oceanic plastic — only heightened the concern.  But this well-intentioned campaign assumes that single-use plastics, such as straws and coffee stirrers, have much to do with ocean pollution.  And that assumption is based on some highly dubious data.

EU proposes to ban plastic straws, stirs, and cotton buds.  The European Union has proposed banning plastic products like cotton buds, straws, stirs and balloon sticks when alternatives are easily available in an attempt to reduce litter spoiling beaches and ocean beds.

How defective science harms public policy and damages our public schools.  If a scientific study is to be legitimate, it must be reproducible because replication allows examination of the data and the possibility of different conclusions.  If the study is not reproducible it is not really science, and as the authors show, that type of non-science is now common.  In June of 2016, Oona Lönnstedt and Peter Eklöv of Uppsala University published a paper in Science warning of the dangers of microplastic particles in the ocean.  The study got considerable media attention but as it turned out, "Lönnstedt never performed the research that she and Eklöv reported."  So in philosophical terms, it had an existential problem, and veracity is also an issue.

California city wants to charge for every disposable takeout container.  While many cities across the world are banning plastic grocery bags in an effort to cut back on waste, one city in California is taking it one step further by targeting disposable containers and cups.  Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arregu'n held an event Tuesday [4/24/2018] at the local recycling yard to introduce the legislation, which would encourage people to bring their own reusable containers and cups to restaurants and coffee shops or be charged an extra 25 cents.  The Disposable-Free Dining plan would also require to-go containers to be 100 percent compostable or recyclable, chosen from a pre-approved list.

Governor Cuomo introduces bill banning single-use plastic bags in New York state.  A program bill that would ban all single-use, plastic carryout bags at any point of sale in New York State was introduced by Governor Andrew Cuomo Monday [4/23/2018].  The action follows the release of the New York State Plastic Bags Task Force report in January, which outlined the environmental impact of plastic bags, single-use bag reduction measures, and proposed actions that the state could take to reduce pollution and protect New York's natural resources, including a ban on single-use plastic bags.

British PM May takes on plastic straws.  Also ear swabs.  The government of Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May is launching a domestic and international program against plastic straws.  The idea is to have them and other single-use items gone by 2042 when the prime minister turns 86.

Not the Trinity River, not the Mississippi River, not even the Hudson River...
Shocking report reveals that 95% of plastic polluting the world's oceans comes from just TEN rivers including the Ganges and Niger.  Up to 95 percent of plastic polluting the world's oceans pours in from just ten rivers, according to new research.  The top 10 rivers — eight of which are in Asia — accounted for so much plastic because of the mismanagement of waste.  About five trillion pounds is floating in the sea, and targeting the major sources — such as the Yangtze and the Ganges — could almost halve it, scientists claim.

Straws and cotton buds could be banned as Theresa May targets plastic pollution.  Plastic straws, drinks stirrers and cotton buds could be banned from sale in England under plans being set out by Theresa May.  The prime minister said plastic waste was "one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the world" and said the UK was taking a lead in tackling the problem.  A consultation on banning the disposable plastic products will launch later this year in an effort to cut the amount of waste which ends up in rivers and oceans.

Busybodies battle outbreaks of freedom.  The majority leader of California's state Assembly has introduced legislation that would impose a fine of up to $1,000 on any waiter or waitress who offers a plastic drinking straw to a customer without being asked.  The Washington Post notes that this is part of a growing anti-straw movement, which is driven by alarm over the 500 million straws that are used every single day — which is almost certainly a fake number, seeing as how it is based on an unconfirmed phone survey by a 9-year-old boy.  (Yes, really.)

Having solved all other problems...
California Considers $1,000 Fine for Waiters Offering Unsolicited Plastic Straws.  Ian Calderon wants restaurateurs to think long and hard before giving you a straw.  Calderon, the Democratic majority leader in California's lower house, has introduced a bill to stop sit-down restaurants from offering customers straws with their beverages unless they specifically request one.  Under Calderon's law, a waiter who serves a drink with an unrequested straw in it would face up to 6 months in jail and a fine of up to $1,000.

Sending Waiters to Jail for Offering Plastic Straws.  It makes absolutely no sense to me that a state that's worked so hard to lower its prison population would even consider passing a law that might clog its jail population full of people whose only crime was asking "Would you like a straw?"

California's Soft Secession Accelerates.  Earlier this week Twitter briefly lit up with news of yet another California progressive excess.  The state's Democratic house majority leader has submitted a bill that imposes criminal penalties on waiters who offer their customers plastic straws. [...] It's not worth spending too much time on this absurd bill (and I do mean absurd — Reason investigated and found that the justification for it rests on research conducted by a nine-year old), but it's a useful segue to a far more significant point.  California is in the midst of an experiment in progressive governance and active resistance that is combining to create a simultaneously dangerous and tantalizing experiment in state autonomy.

15 Times Major Media Outlets Used a Statistic about Plastic Straws Based on Research by a 9-Year-Old.  Yesterday [1/25/2018], I reported that the oft-cited, debate-driving statistic that Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day was the product of a 9-year-old's guesstimations.  Despite those shaky factual foundations, the 500 million figure has quickly spread, virus-like, across the media landscape and even into our shops and schools. [...] Meanwhile, impressionable children at the Mount Vernon Community School in nearby Alexandria, Virginia, are coming home with "Straw Wars" handouts citing the same dubious figure.  It's easy to understand how the school could have been led astray, given how ubiquitous this claim is in the media.  Please see below for a list of just a few of the news outlets that have cited this "fact" — or otherwise quoted people saying it without any critical pushback — in their reporting: [...]

North Carolina Bag Ban Under Fire.  The North Carolina Senate passed a bill rescinding a plastic-bag ban applying to the state's Outer Banks region.  The ban was enacted by the state's legislature in 2010.  The North Carolina Retail Merchants association says the replacement bags cost them 800 percent more than the plastic bags the law banned.  State Sen. Bill Cook (R-Beaufort County), the sponsor of the bill repealing the ban, says the ban has been ineffective.

This is only slightly off-topic:
A campaign to eliminate plastic straws is sucking in thousands of converts.  It started so innocently.  A kid ordered a soda in a restaurant.  "It came with a plastic straw in it," Milo Cress recalled.  He glared at the straw for a while.  "It seemed like such a waste."  Not only did Cress yank the plastic from his drink, but he also launched a campaign, "Be Straw Free," targeting all straws as needless pollution.  He knocked on the doors of restaurants in Burlington, Vt., where he lived at the time, and asked managers not to offer straws unless patrons asked.  He was 9 years old.

The Editor says...
It should be obvious that public policy should not be influenced by the impulses of a 9-year-old kid from Vermont.  A soft drink comes with a straw -- or at least straws are made available nearby -- because that's what most customers prefer and expect.  Those who consider this wasteful are abnormal.  Those who would ban plastic straws altogether are busybodies.

Food stamp purchases exempt from Chicago's new 7-cent bag tax.  Chicago's seven-cents-a-bag tax goes into effect today.  Plastic bags were legalized just so they could be taxed.  It's what Rahm Emanuel calls Chicago Values.  So if I make the mistake of driving five miles south of my home to Chicago — which already has a higher sales tax rate than Morton Grove — to shop for groceries I'll have to pay a bag tax if accept bags — whether plastic or paper — to lug my purchases into my car.

Bag the Ban.  Plastic shopping bags — the kind you get from your grocer or at the corner store — might soon vanish from stores in your community.  Misguided bans and taxes on plastic bags could weigh down the economy, increase costs for consumers and small business, and leave a larger carbon footprint on the environment than alternatives.  Plus, plastic bags are 100 percent recyclable and reused by 90 percent of consumers.  It's time for a common-sense plastic bag policy that's good for the economy, the environment, and working families.  Keep reading to find out why bag bans and taxes are a bad idea for America.

Michigan just banned banning plastic bags.  A new law in Michigan will prohibit local governments from banning, regulating or imposing fees on the use of plastic bags and other containers.  You read that correctly:  It's not a ban on plastic bags -- it's a ban on banning plastic bags.  Michigan Lt. Gov. Brian Calley signed the new public act into law on Wednesday [12/28/2016], along with 11 other bills.  Gov. Rick Snyder is currently on vacation out of state, local news sources reported, and Calley has the authority to sign bills into law in his absence.

Good News: Chicago Repeals Ban on Plastic Bags. Bad News: Chicagoans Will Now Pay Tax on Plastic Bags.  This just in from the "They'll get you one way or another" department:  Chicago's unpopular ban on plastic bags will be repealed as of January 1, 2017.  But on February 1st, Chicagoans will begin paying a 7-cent-per-bag "checkout tax."  As reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, the tax will apply to both plastic and paper bags.

Chicago repeals plastic bag ban.  Chicago's plastic bag ban will be no more come Jan. 1.  The City Council voted last month to repeal the ban, allowing retailers in Chicago to go back to providing regular plastic bags.  The council also voted to push back the start date for collecting taxes on all bags.

Nanny State of the Week:  Chicago tries again with plastic bag tax.  Some of the biggest cities in the United States have taken it upon themselves to wage a war on plastic bags under the guise of environmentalism.  But, as many have continued to discover, plastic bags are not the scourge they imagine, and their nanny policies continue to fail.  Chicago is the latest to go back to this well.  Earlier this month, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's budget was approved by the city council with a 7-cent tax on plastic bags — 5 cents of which will go to the city.  While bag taxes like these are sold as an environmental necessity, studies in multiple locales have shown that bag taxes rarely do much environmental good, and cities simply use the money raised to plug budget holes.  Plastic bag fees are merely a stealth tax hike that disproportionately hits families that go grocery shopping more frequently.

France Bans All Plastic Dishware Starting in 2020.  The Associated Press reports that France has enacted a ban on all plastic dishes, cups, and utensils.  The ban goes into effect in 2020, after which all disposable utensils and dishes must be made of biological, rather than petroleum-based, material.  Organizations representing packaging manufacturers are fighting the ban, saying that it violates European Union commerce rules.  The ban follows a similar French ban on plastic bags.

City Council approves controversial plastic bag 'tax'.  Time to BYO-Bag.  That convenient double-handled plastic bag Big Apple shoppers get at check-out is officially going to come with a price tag.  The City Council on Thursday [5/5/2016] green-lit a controversial bill that puts a 5-cent fee on plastic and paper shopping bags at grocery, convenience and other stores.  The council voted 28-20 for the bill, which will take effect on Oct. 1.  It is supposed to encourage people to bring along reusable bags when they go shopping.

De Blasio throws support behind 'tax' on grocery bags.  Mayor de Blasio all but said he'll back a 5-cent fee on shopping bags to reduce waste a day after City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito endorsed the controversial bill.  In a radio interview, de Blasio said he wants to see some minor tinkering to the bill before he'd sign it into law but disputed opponents' claim that the so-called "tax" on plastic and paper bags unfairly socks the poor.

China is lead contributor to plastic trash in oceans, study says.  Millions of tons of plastic trash flow into the world's oceans each year, and a new study finds that most of it comes from China and developing economies in Asia.  The study, published in Friday's [2/13/2015] edition of the journal Science, estimates that China's heavily coastal population contributes 1.3 million to 3.5 million metric tons of plastic to the world's oceans each year, largely due to mismanaged waste.

Bag This Tax.  If one wanted a better example of how elected officials jump at any chance to control behavior using tax laws, rely on unscientific bases for legislation, and then waste the new revenue they get on phony propaganda lying about the effectiveness of their program, they could find no better example than D.C.'s tax on plastic bags.  Like many really dumb ideas, this one started in San Francisco.  In 2007, San Francisco banned disposable plastic grocery bags.  Washington D.C.'s city council jumped on the bandwagon, imposing a five-cent tax on plastic bags given out by grocery, convenience, and liquor stores.

California bans bags; Arizona bags bans.  The nanny state-environmentalist complex misled the public about the nature of the plastic ban and paper tax.  Lawmakers wooed lobbyists and Big Business with the promise that grocers could pocket the dime-a-bag excise fee for paper totes.  That single allowance is estimated to earn the grocers a dizzying $1 billion in new revenue, according to economic forecasts.

Are plastic bags back in Huntington Beach?  For two years, Huntington Beach stores have been prohibited from wrapping up groceries and other goods in plastic.  The repeal is now scheduled to have a second reading before it's officially adopted 30 days later.

The Left Avows Its Ungodly Love of Filth.  The leftist intellect portrays waste where a marvel of engineering and utility exists.  There's the obvious:  the plastic bag enables us to segregate our groceries.  Meat remains separated from fruit and vegetables.  We've all encountered the leaky package of raw chicken.  Because the chicken is segregated, the risk of salmonella and coliform is minimized.  Best of all, the chicken-contaminated plastic bag can simply be tossed away.  Compare this to the revolting reusable grocery bag — canvas or polypropylene — which over time festers a cauldron of mold and bacteria and, thus, disease.  Why?  Because no one washes the reusable bag after it has lugged home the leaky chicken.

California's next big political fight: Plastic grocery bags.  Go to a grocery store in California and buy all the milk, eggs and vegetables you want.  But there's one thing you won't find at the checkout line, beginning July 1, 2015:  Plastic bags to carry your stuff home.  Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Tuesday signed into law a ban on single-use plastic bags, making California the first state to prohibit stores from using the ubiquitous carry-alls.  Shoppers will be charged 10 cents for every paper bag and heavy-duty plastic bag they use.

California's Plastic Bag Ban And A State's Death Wish.  California, as is its wont, enacted another bunch of silly laws this week, topped by a ban on the plastic bags that we all find so handy. [...] Nobody likes a "torrent of plastic polluting our beaches, parks and even the vast ocean itself," as Brown says.  Yet plastic bags still end up where they shouldn't be.  The answer, however, isn't to ban the bags, which people use not only for groceries but for everything from toting lunches to picking up pet droppings.  The solution is to penalize those who foul the commons, not just with plastic bags but with all kinds of other litter.  Californians actually may be worse off with the ban.  It could, for example, actually make people sick, since the reusable bags that shoppers are being urged to switch to can harbor food-borne illnesses.

California becomes first state to ban plastic bags.  Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed legislation imposing the nation's first statewide ban on single-use plastic bags, driven to action by a buildup of litter and damage to aquatic ecosystems.

The Benefits of Polythene Plastic Bags.  We hate to burst your bubble, but those trendy cotton shopping bags are a false economy, in our opinion.  You'd have to use one of them around 130 times before its efficiency equalled that of one plastic bag used just once.  Why?  Because it takes far more energy and resources to manufacture them.  And if you tend to throw yours in the washing machine every couple of weeks, its carbon-efficiency plummets further.  So if you use a cotton jute for your trip to the market once a week and decline a plastic bag every time, you'd need to use the same cotton bag every week for roughly two and a half years before the option paid off.

California passes plastic bag ban, would be first such law in U.S.  The California state legislature enacted a ban on plastic grocery bags on Friday [8/29/2014] near the end of its two-year session, a measure that if signed into law would become the first of its kind in America.  A number of cities and counties in California and other U.S. states, including Hawaii's Maui County, have made it illegal for grocery stores to pack purchases in plastic.

California lawmakers send governor a ban on single-use plastic bags.  The state Senate on Friday [8/29/2014] gave final legislative approval to a measure that would phase out single-use plastic bags in supermarkets, pharmacies and convenience stores as part of an effort to rid beaches and streets of litter.  The measure, which now goes to Gov. Jerry Brown for consideration, would allow stores to charge customers 10 cents to provide paper or reusable plastic bags as an alternative to single-use bags.

The Editor says...
Does the term "single-use plastic bags" include sandwich bags, dry cleaning bags, 30-gallon garbage bags, or those flimsy little produce bags that you put bananas in?  Tree-hugging activists had better think it through before promoting a ban on "single-use plastic bags."

Plastic Bag Fantasy Island Vanishes Like Atlantis, Scientist Corrects Million-Ton Floating Estimate.  The scientist whose findings environmentalists used to shame us into bringing our own reusable bags to the grocery store now says that his estimate of one million tons of plastic floating in the ocean may have been off by a factor of perhaps 143.  His latest estimate ranges from 7,000 to 35,000 tons, and even most of that has biodegraded into granules.

The Garbage Philosophy Behind The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Myth.  Why should we all be skeptical of doomsday claims about global warming?  Well, there are a lot of reasons.  But from now on, I can sum it all up in one simple phrase: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  This was an environmentalist scare that became a bit of a trend from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s.  The idea was that there is a giant floating raft of consumer trash in the middle of the Pacific where ocean currents created a kind of dead spot and all the flotsam and jetsam of the ocean gathered together.  It was supposed to be a vast floating indictment — twice the size of Texas! the size of a continent! — of our wicked, wasteful lifestyles.  The problem is that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch never existed.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Hoax.  A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could mean bad news for environmental doomsayers.  Forget all those warnings about the million tons of plastic debris floating in the ocean.  Ignore the photos that you think show the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Andres Cozar of the University of Cadiz in Spain is the man who once extrapolated the 1 million-ton estimate.  Since then, however, he has led research that collected samples at 141 ocean sites.  Cozar's new estimate:  Between 7,000 and 35,000 tons of plastic are floating in the ocean.  Cozar's team didn't find country-sized islands of plastic bags strangling baby birds and sea turtles.  It found "micro plastics."  What people think of as a dump doesn't look like floating junk.  Instead, ocean current "convergence zones" are swirling with flecks of plastic — like a snow globe a half-minute after you shake it — and with considerably less plastic trash than expected.

The 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' myth.  Many, perhaps most, Americans believe that a vast accumulation of (mostly plastic) garbage is floating somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, a non-biodegradable stain on humanity, choking and deforming fish.  But apparently, that is just a myth.

An Ocean of Plastic.  There is a lot of plastic trash and debris going to the world's oceans.  It used to be dumped intentionally — New York City barged its municipal trash out to sea and tipped it in for years and years, as recently as 1992.  There is no longer any country or municipality known to be disposing of municipal trash and garbage at sea today.  Most trash and garbage is fairly readily decomposed in the natural environment and in modern landfills. [...] Jenna Jambeck summarizes it saying that the amount of plastic estimated to be washing into the oceans is "one to three orders of magnitude greater than the reported mass of plastic in high-concentration ocean gyres".  That means that 10 to 1,000 times more plastic is going into the oceans than can be found.  So, the Big Question about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — all the Garbage Patches — is:  "Where is all that plastic?"

Restrictions On Plastic Bags Fail To Deliver Results.  One argument for plastic bag bans is that cities will save money by reducing the costs of litter collection, solid waste disposal and recycling.  And in tight fiscal times when municipal budgets are strained, the argument is compelling.  However, a recent study by the National Center for Policy Analysis demonstrates that there is simply no evidence that plastic bag restrictions reduce these costs.

L.A. starts 2014 with its new plastic-bag ban.  For Los Angeles residents, the perfect holiday gift this year might have been a reusable grocery bag.  On Wednesday [1/1/2014], large grocery stores will be prohibited by law from providing free plastic bags.  Shoppers will be required to bring their own bags when stocking up on food and goods, or pay 10 cents per paper bag provided by the grocery store.  Smaller independent markets and liquor stores that sell groceries will become subject to the ban July 1.

Study: Banning Plastic Grocery Bags Does Not Cut Disposal Costs.  Banning plastic grocery bags does not reduce disposal and recycling costs, a study of several U.S. cities shows.  Consumers choose plastic bags far more often than paper or reusable bags to carry their purchases.  Compared to paper and reusable bags, plastic bags are lightweight, strong, flexible, and moisture-resistant.  In addition, they are easy to store and reusable for multiple purposes.  Many studies have demonstrated previously overlooked health and environmental benefits of plastic grocery bags, such as their ability to prevent spread of foodborne diseases.  Despite these characteristics and their popularity, a growing number of municipalities and some states are enacting laws aimed at reducing the use of plastic (and sometimes paper) grocery bags.  The laws range from taxes to outright bans.

Banning Plastic Bags Harms the Environment, Raises Costs.  Government bans on plastic grocery bags harm the environment and do not reduce consumer costs, the National Center for Policy Analysis reports in a new study.  "Bag bans are bad for the environment.  The alternatives — paper bags and reusable bags — use more energy, use more resources, produce more greenhouse gases, and produce more waste and pollution than plastic grocery bags," reported study author H. Sterling Burnett.  Plastic bag opponents have argued bag bans will reduce costs by reducing litter costs, solid waste disposal, and recycling expenses, the study observed.  However, the study examined the experiences of several cities that banned plastic bags and found no such cost savings.

Your Non-Plastic Bags Are Killing the Earth, Hippies.  [Scroll down]  Of course, you're wondering, aside from inconvenience and the potential for distressing and dangerous gastric illnesses, what could possibly go wrong when you ask people to abandon plastic grocery bags for reusable or paper ones?  Well, the Progressive Bag Alliance just released a study on the environmental impact of "alternative" grocery containment measures, and it turns out, by switching to reusable and paper bags, you're actually sort of killing the earth faster.

Plastic Bag Ban Responsible For Spike In E. Coli Infections, Study Says.  A research paper published last year by professors at the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University found San Francisco's ban on plastic bags has had significant negative repercussions on public health.

Shoplifting soars in Seattle grocery stores after ban on plastic bags.  When the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a ban on plastic bags and required businesses to charge a nickel for paper bags, city leaders believed it would be better all around. [...] But the bag ban is contributing to thousands of dollars in losses for at least one Seattle grocery store, and questions have been raised about the risk of food-borne illness from reusable bags that shoppers don't often wash.

The Disgusting Consequences of Plastic-Bag Bans.  Conservatives often point out that laws, no matter how benign they may appear, have unintended consequences.  They can reverberate in ways that not many people foresaw and nobody wanted:  Raising the minimum wage can increase unemployment; prohibition can create black markets.  The efforts in many cities to discourage the use of plastic bags demonstrate that such unintended consequences can be, among other things, kind of gross.

Bill in N.J. Senate would force stores to charge 15 cents for each plastic or paper bag distributed.  Legislation encouraging customers in New Jersey to carry reusable shopping bags and forcing larger retailers to slash distribution of plastic bags gets its first hearing today [12/17/2012].