Coming Soon: Disposable Clothing

Two new plastic bag bans last week!


Los Angeles is now the largest city with a ban. In addition to getting rid of plastic bags (over a 6- to 12-month phase out), stores will also have to charge 10 cents for paper bags.


Even better, an entire state is now plastic bag free! Three of the four counties in Hawaii already had bans; now Honolulu county has joined, and as an extra bonus, paper bags must now contain at least 40% recycled material.


I love/hate reading comments on articles about this topic. Especially comments about the "health concerns". A few weeks ago, an Oregon soccer team had an outbreak of norovirus. One of the girls spend an evening being sick in a hotel bathroom, then another girl grabbed a reusable bag out of said (contaminated) bathroom to carry cookies, which was then passed around on the ride home. Tests showed that the bag was indeed the carrier of the virus.


Google "reusable bag health risk" and you'll find numerous articles about the alleged hazards. Fortunately, most contain, obliquely, a grain of common sense, stating that the issue arises because most users never wash their bags. Yet the conclusion reached from that is that the bags themselves are harmful. 


Let's see... if you put raw meat on a cutting board, you wash it to avoid cross-contamination, yes? If you touch raw meat with your hands, you also wash your hands to avoid cross-contamination? But if you put raw meat in a bag, it doesn't make sense to wash it to avoid cross-contamination.

The clothing analogy comes up often in response to such health concerns. Even if the logical flaw wasn't already obvious, I think it presents a good way to get the message across - to paraphrase a comment from an Oregonian article that I can't find at the moment:

It's too much work to wash and reuse a bag, so we have to use a disposable bag once and then throw it away. Just like we all wear plastic clothes and throw them away after wearing them once, instead of washing and reusing fabric clothing.

It's even more fun, though, when you combine all this with one of the plastic bag manufacturers' arguments for the benefits of their bags - they can be reused! Helix Poly even suggests you use them to carry your lunch. But that's not dangerous...