Eyes on the Plastic Prize

By Mickey Friedman
March 23, 2014

You. Yes, you. Put down that coffee cup for just a minute. And you — with the white wine spritzer. Take a moment, a deep breath. Now give yourself a hand. A heartfelt round of applause.

Because if you live in Great Barrington or just shop here, you have done something special. Yes, we of the Best Small Town in America have together banned the “thin film single-use plastic checkout bag.”

And thanks to God, our courageous powers-that-be, and our so-very-sensible voters, we won’t be seeing them anywhere around here anymore.

As Gandhi and Martin Luther King taught us, it’s all about keeping your eyes on the prize.

Tragically, “thin film single-use plastic checkout bag have significant impacts on the environment … contributing to the potential death of marine animals through ingestion and entanglement.”

Creating “a burden to solid waste collection and recycling facilities … requiring millions of barrels of crude oil nationally for their manufacture.”

I say rest easy today certain that our thin film single-use bag didn’t entangle that dead porpoise. While it might have been that plastic ring from our six-pack, it very certainly wasn’t that grocery bag with the plastic handles.

There will always be nitpickers. You might know one or two. Saying it makes no sense to ban the bags with handles when we should also ban those plastic rings that come with beer, Coke, and Pepsi. And those snazzy Italian orange and grapefruit Pellegrino drinks.

Eyes on the prize. I’m sure the Select Board made a point to study the issue. Odds are, getting your turtle head stuck in a thin film single-use plastic checkout bag is a hell of a lot worse than getting your seabird head stuck in one of those thick plastic rings.

Remember the longest journey starts with a single small step.

I heard a Republican complain that we should have fined the left-wing Berkshire Eagle for wrapping their newspapers in those thin orange plastic bags. The ones that can suffocate babies and children.

But Rome wasn’t built in a day.

I overheard a high school kid ask why we didn’t ban all those other flimsy plastic bags that are everywhere in the produce section. And by the baked goods. The ones that can barely hold a banana without breaking.

Has he heard about Nelson Mandela? Learned about eyes on the prize? We use these plastic bags for our mushrooms, onions, and potatoes. And for our farm-to-store-to-table organic kale. For our bagels.

Our granolas, pistachios, and walnuts. There’s white rice and brown rice, short-grained and long-grained. The black beans we soak overnight.

The plastic containers for our locally ground machine-to-table almond butter. Our dark chocolate covered almonds.

Less focused men and women, distracted by the grandiose desire to solve the larger problem, would have gone after the thousands of plastic bottles that are everywhere about us. Thirty brands of water. Soft drinks, apple juice and cran-blueberry, organic carrot-kale juice. Our reinvigorating sports drinks. The five-hour wake-ups that let us drive tractor-trailers when we should be sleeping.

Forget the cranky complainers, I say celebrate. The Berkshire Record story says it all: Price Chopper calls it “a tremendous success” with close to 60% of folks bringing their recyclable bags.

I know firsthand that every large victory comes with its own small defeats. I lost a girlfriend to the ban.

“Unbelievable,” she grumbled. “You won’t ban semi-automatic assault rifles that kill kids. Then, in a world of plastic junk, you ban the one and only plastic thing I actually use. I hate plastic. But I use those bags all the time. For my dog, my garbage. My friends use them for dirty diapers. And you call them ‘single use.’

“You talk about the environment, but other plastics are far worse. More sea critters die because of fishing lines. Landfills? Plastic bags account for less than one-half of one percent while paper products account for 40 percent.

“And, perfect timing, we ban them when we should be collecting them. On February 22nd, the Wall Street Journal reported that the University of Illinois and Department of Agriculture found a way to recycle plastic grocery shopping bags into diesel, gasoline, and natural gas. Producing more energy than the process consumes. So let’s collect and recycle them. Let’s run our town trucks with the help of thin-film plastic bags.

“And your solution?” She was shaking her head now. “The University of Arizona discovered bacteria in almost all the recyclable shopping bags they tested. Coliform bacteria in half; E coli in 12%. There’s yeast, mold, viruses, and other pathogens, posing substantial health risks. Have the selectmen urged people to routinely wash their recyclable bags?”

When I said I didn’t think Arizona had a university, she slammed the door behind her. I haven’t seen her since.

I took a deep breath. And reminded myself: Eyes on the plastic prize.

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For more information:

http://uanews.org/story/reusable-grocery-bags-contaminated-e-coli-other-bacteria

“From Plastic to Petro” Daniel Akst, February 22-23, 2014, The Wall Street Journal

The Grocery Bag Controversy
http://www.silverhillinstitute.com/pdf/plastic_bags_2012.pdf

http://www.plasticsindustry.org/AboutPlastics/content.cfm?ItemNumber=790&navItemNumber=1124

EPA on Plastic
http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/plastics.htm