Bag ban, tax or recycling?

Original posting:
Tuesday, August 25, 2009

The city of Seattle recently took on the issue of plastic bags. A proposed 20 cent bag fee went to the voters. Unfortunately, but not suprisingly, this failed. The problem I think is that in the state of Washington our taxes are so high already. In this economy, people just couldn't imagine paying another fee, which was interpreted by many as another tax.

Now I don't live in Seattle, but I do support legislation that would help eliminate and reduce the ever growing problem of plastic bags. Many cities across the country and around the world are bringing these types of legislation to the table. In Edmonds, a waterfront city here in Washington State, a bag ban was passed and is going into effect in the next year. In New Dehli, India, a bag ban is in effect and in Ireland, there is a plasti-tax on bags which reduced their consumption of plastic bags by 90%.

I've had a lot of questions lately as to how I can support any of these types of legislation when my business is recycling plastic bags. The answer is simple really. The reason I started FatBottomBags is to reduce plastic bag use and plastic bags in our landfills and more importantly in our oceans. FatBottomBags is my recycling project and reducing plastic bags is my number one reason for making FatBottomBags from plastic bags.

I hope that someday plastic shopping bags will be banned in my area and when there are no longer plastic bags to be made into FatBottomBags I will gladly work in a different media!

I am supporting The world's first Plastic Bag Free Day will be on the 12th September 2009. Please join me on this day and make a statement about your commitment to bettering your environment. 24 hours + 0 plastic bags = doing a small thing to change the big picture!

I've printed up posters for my local bulliten board and you can do the same. Let's spread the word about reducing our use of plastic bags! For poster go to: http://www.adoptabeach.org.uk/downloads/aab/PBFD_Poster.pdf