Bag Tax: The Consequences Of The Industrial Revolution

Take a moment to imagine the realization that a young boy came to when two of his favorite movies had a large plotline that was somewhat based on the problems of trash. Wall-E, the famous Pixar movie, was based on a small robot that was left behind on Earth’s surface alone. His job was to clean the garbage that the human population left behind when they went into space to escape their problems. Toy Story 3, another Pixar movie, contained a scene with garbage that was vital to the plot, in which the characters are rescued from a trash furnace that was consuming literally tons of trash a minute. These two movies tried to make the American population aware of the ever growing trash situation, however, Americans quickly forgot about the Earth shattering situation that they are causing. The solution to the world’s trash problem is easy; people need to be educated on the problems of trash and given an easy way to fix it. People should be required to visit a landfill, educated on the severity of the trash problem, and should be rewarded for changing their habits to improve the problem.

Imagine someone tossing a cigarette out of their window. That cigarette gets blown onto someone’s yard and is eaten by their pet. That pet could become seriously sick because of someone else's laziness. According to www.kab.org, over 51 billion pieces of litter land on U.S. roadways each year. That is just roadways. For that cleanup, America spends 11.5 billion dollars each year. 9.1 billion of those dollars are paid by businesses, with the other 2.4 billion being paid between schools, government, and other organizations. Another reason why if all this littering could be disposed of properly, America would have much more money put toward other important

Much of this trash ends up in the ocean harming not only marine life, but us too. However, this is not only happening in America it’s happening all over the world with China at 8.82 million metric tons of mismanaged waste. All this waste if caught in a gyre, can lead to one of the garbage patches. This has been happening since we started using plastic but it the garbage patches were discovered in the early 1990’s. We keep throwing trash away that keeps being misplaced, then it ends up in the oceans with the rest of the trash. I propose multiple solutions, to enforce plastic bag ban and to enforce recycling. California has banned the use of plastic bags, meaning that if you do use them a fine will be put in place. Environment California explained how before the plastic bag ban California used up to 19 billion plastic bags each year with less than five percent being recycled. However, we can change that. By using less plastic bags we harm the ocean less. Another solution is to each week collect each household’s trash, per pound of trash found in the recycling bin provided by the city should be a $11 fine. Tiffany Edmonds, Solid Waste Management Department spokeswoman, explained why they started the fine “ It is an attempt to change behavior. The fine covers the cost of sending a garbage collection truck to the house to pick up the contaminated recycling bin” this will encourage people to recycle. Since the plastic

The amount of waste that’s produced by the lack of concern for the environment is huge. We as Americans don’t see it as a total problem because we’re doing different things that we don’t pay attention to. We as people need to learn the concept of not wasting anything to harm the people and other things around us.

Even if it is just so the generations after us won't have to work even harder than we will to clean up our planet. Going back the website tree huggers they have another article about how Sweden has not only gotten rid of their trash, they actually have an issue where they aren't producing enough trash. In the article “Oslo runs out of garbage, imports it from rest of the world” by, Michael Graham Richard. He goes on to explain “the city of Oslo in Scandinavia, uses basically a recycling plant to generate electricity and heat for nearly half of the city. They can't even produce enough trash so they have to import it from other countries” so the goal is one hundred percent attainable, we just need to come together and start caring a little more about the place we call

Instead of making recycling a law, how about just promoting and honor those who do. For example; those who are recycling every week and do it continuously, lower their trash bill, or give them a free ticket to the local football game. When those who are not recycling see what those who are, are getting out of it, maybe they'll catch on and do the same.

The average U.S. citizen consumes eighteen tons of natural resources per year and generates an even higher volume of wastes. These wastes get dumped and unloaded into rivers, lakes, and oceans and other landfills; only a small portion are recycled. The spread of mass consumption over the U.S. and its effects are staggering. The production and processing of our wants and needs is done by the extraction of natural resources such as fossil fuels, wood, ore, and water. This requires the creation of factories which gives off poisonous byproducts, while the commodities create more pollutants and waste themselves. This process keeps cycling over and over to create a bigger and more detrimental problem on our environment. Who is paying for this? The Earth; our environment.

Plastic bags begin as crude oil, natural gases, or other petrochemical derivatives. By some estimates almost 12 million barrels of petroleum oil are used to make 100 billion plastic bags. One solution is to stop using plastic bags. Plastic bag bans are spreading across the country with over 100 community bag bans across 16 states. Hawaii right now is the only state in the nation to adopt a full statewide ban. Internationally,19 countries from Bangladesh to Ireland have passed bans. Reducing plastic bag usage and shoppers to use reusable bags will help decrease our demand for a new fossil fuel and reduce our environmental impact. As a nation we need to begin to move away from the concepts of single use and waste. Plastic is made from oil.

In the world we live in today where it is the norm to do as one please as long as there is no one there to say other-wise; the people on this earth as a whole pollute every day of their lives. There are people littering and polluting the world as we speak. On a daily basis as I drive around, Sacramento, I see cigarette butts thrown out windows, cups flying out cars, and plastic bags floating around. I am a smoker, yet I do not throw cigarettes out the window for the convenience due to the fact that it is littering and making the world a dirtier place. The one place I see the most trash are along the rivers and beaches. As I accompany my father fishing at the local rivers and ponds all I see is trash everywhere alongside the roads and rivers.

We can start by recycling bottles, paper and all plastic within our own home separately from trash or be fined for not doing so. I think that the USA should ban the manufacturing and distribution of plastic bags and make it mandatory for consumer to carry recycle bags or have it available in store for purchase. All stores should charge for plastic bag and this will us to use recycle

The objective of this report is to illustrate the effect of the implementation of a plastic bag tax in Australia. By providing a brief overview of issues, correlated with plastic bag consumption in conjunction with current and proposed changes to policies in Australia. Through the application of economic theory, it can determined whether a tax would decrease consumption and through supporting evidence indicating its efficiency when applied in practice.

As the United States deals with the overwhelming amounts of waste building up, Nitin et al explain that “plastics take anywhere from 15 to 1000 years to biodegrade” once they are discarded (Nitin). Changes in recycling methods can no longer keep up with the exorbitant amount of waste produced in the United States. This is why some states choose to take their initiative one step further by placing either fees or a ban on the use of plastic bags. Due to the enormous waste the United States produces on a daily basis and the negative outcomes of this trash including adverse health effects, harmful impacts on nature, and the exponential piling of trash in landfills, the US government should ban plastic bags.

A worker at a paper factory in Illinois states, “Then the issue was saving a tree. But trees are replaced. We plant them, we cut them, we plant them again” (Pendleton). The worker also said, “The problem now is the landfill situation, I think this one is going to stick” (Pendleton). By 1991 thirty-nine states and hundreds of local governments have passed laws or solutions requiring the purchase of recycled paper. According to Henry Miller, vice president of a paper mill said, “By volume, thirty-eight percent of solid waste in a landfill is paper and cardboard” (Pendleton). That paper and cardboard, if recycled could have produced that much paper or other products and it would have cleared up thirty-eight percent of many landfills across America. One major way to get people involved with recycling is the environment perspective. Not only would the landfills be cut down the environment gains a lot by having people recycle. So what do the states do to keep the environment clean? They enact laws against litter and waste. One way is the state requiring the deposit on beer and soft-drink bottles and cans (Prichard 8A). In those states, millions of bottles and cans that once were left on beaches, tossed in rivers and parks or thrown along the highways are being taken back to stores instead for a refund. A twenty-year old student from Michigan said, “Throwing away cans is like throwing away money to me” (Prichard 8A). These state laws must be working if people have this

American citizens throw away millions of tons of garbage each year, and this trash has to go somewhere. While there are projects underway to clean and reuse this refuse most of it gets dumped into huge landfills. These landfills are disgusting festering blisters on our country's landscape. But people continue to consume and throw away more and more in the name of convenience. As they see it, when things get old, throw it away and get a new one. They blame the government for the trash problem, but the truth blame should be placed on themselves.

In other words, in this era of high oil prices and energy scarcity, petroleum-based bags are costing considerable natural resources, and ultimately turn them into a huge pile of useless garbage. Actually, significant energies like fuel, from which ethylene gas is obtained and plastic bags are made, are nonrenewable, while human beings are still consuming these precious treasures recklessly. What's more, the plastic bags easily catch wind and blow, causing the difficulty of confining it to where disposed of (Borrud, 2007, p.75). This leads to the difficulty in recycling, which hinders the circulation and reuse of the material to a large extent. Moreover, Ross Mirkarimi, the author of the ban, also notes that the only 1% of the plastic bags in San Francisco is recycled, in spite of the city's perfect local recycling system ("100 Billion Reasons," 2007, p.77). People's poor awareness on energy-saving has brought the oil-shortage crisis one step further. A prohibitory edict on petroleum-based bags might be a right way out before we ultimately realize that the last calorie on the earth comes from our body temperature.