October 09

 

Taxes that make cents!

 

 

It's time for a Plastic Bag Tax in Southampton!

 

Imagine Southampton without plastic shopping bags. It could be the future. It wasn’t that long ago that stores started using them. Grocery stores didn’t start using plastic bags until the early 1980’s.

 

There is a growing international movement to ban or discourage the use of plastic bags because of their environmental effects. Countries from Ireland to Australia are cracking down on the bags and action is beginning to stir in the United States.

 

ecoeastend.com would like to focus attention on our community, starting with the Township of Southampton.

 

The ubiquitous plastic shopping bag, so handy for everything from toting groceries to disposing of doggie doo, may be a victim of its own success. Although they didn’t come into widespread use until the early 1980’s, it is estimated that 500 billion to 1 trillion of the bags are now used worldwide every year.

 

In China there is so many plastic bags blowing around that they are called “white pollution.”

 

In South Africa, the bags are so prominent in the countryside that they have won the derisive title of “national flower.” This is sad.

 

The bags use up natural resources, consumer energy to manufacture, create litter, choke marine life and add to landfill waste. 12 million barrels of oil are used to produce these bags. Millions are spent each year cleaning up the waste. Every time we use a new plastic bag the manufacturers go and get more petroleum from the Middle East and bring it over in tankers. We are extracting and destroying the Earth to use a plastic bag for 10 minutes.

 

Details of Irelands Successful “Plas Tax”.

 

In March of 2002, the Republic of Ireland became the first country to introduce a plastic bag tax called the Plas Tax.

 

Designed to rein in their rampant consumption of 1.2 billion plastic shopping bags per year, the tax resulted in a 90% drop in consumption, and approximately 1 billion fewer bags consumed annually.

 

In this win- win scenario, approximately $9.6 million was raised from the tax in the first year.

 

How does it work?

 

First of all, the purpose is to change consumer behavior, not to generate revenue, changing habits from mindless consumption, to reducing and reusing.

 

In a nutshell, it’s a simple market-based solution in the form of a consumption tax. Individuals pay a fee $.15 per plastic bag consumed at check out. Retailers save money since they'd stock a smaller quantity of bags. (In Ireland, on average, they were spending $50 million a year on single-use plastic bags). Many retailers are also now benefiting from selling reusable bags.

 

What are the results?

 

Consumption dropped approximately 90%.

Litter has been dramatically reduced.

Approximately 18,000,000 liters of oil have been saved.

Reusable shopping bags, rather than paper are taking the place of plastic.

Weaker plastic bag companies went out of business, while others have benefited by seizing the opportunity to make reusable bags.

 

Summary

 

The Plas Tax is a major success.

Consumers have widely adopted using reusable shopping bags and retailers no longer incur the costs associated with giving away free bags.

Join Us. Go to our website www.ecoeastend.com and sign the petition so we can make this happen in our community.