Hasta La Ideas

A website called Plastic Bag Ban Report documents that trend (encompassing paper bags, too) with a grinding regularity. Last month, L.A.’s City Council voted “No store shall provide a plastic or paper single-use carryout bag to a customer.” This month, Santa Fe got plastic bags banned and attached a fee to paper bags. Now Laredo, Texas and Vail, Colorado are mulling over similar policies.

Just yesterday, an interesting development in recycling—one that you’re bound to have mixed feelings about—as brought to our attention. As more individual businesses and municipalities are starting to ban both paper and plastic bags, or impose fees to discourage their use, it’s pissing off a certain group of people. No, not consumers. Recyclers.

The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, or ISRI, yesterday fired a blast out of their e-mail gun stating “Policymakers are banning bags and creating fees without considering the real impact on recycling, and the recycling industry… Rather than bans and fees that take away jobs and increase costs to consumers, policy makers should take advantage of the great economic and environmental opportunities associated with responsibly recycling these bags.” They followed this up with some surprising statistics:

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