Wakefield bag rule has big hole
Dear Wakefield Town Council,
Since moving to a nearby community last year, my lovely bride, Buttercup, and I have done all our weekly grocery shopping at a market in your town.
Until July 1. That was the date your brilliant decision took effect to ban one of the greatest inventions of humankind:
The plastic shopping bag. Do you remember what life was like before the plastic bag? When you’d have to make five or six trips out to the car — with the kids running around and the baby crying — just to get the groceries in the kitchen? For people in apartments and triple-deckers, it was even worse.
What did you use to pick up your dog’s poo before the plastic bag? Or line your bathroom trash can? What did you wrap your wet bathing suits in on the way back from the beach? How did you haul your stuff for the office party into work?
Everyone who’s busy, who works, who has places to go — in short, everyone with a life — loves plastic shopping bags. And Wakefield, you banned them. Why?
I know why. Because all the “cool towns” were doing it. (According to MassGreen.org, 81 of them so far.) Because you wanted to do some virtue signaling on the cheap. Like Concord banning bottled water or Seattle banning drinking straws, you didn’t care about the consequences. You just wanted to look cool.
You know who doesn’t look cool? A single mom with two kids, three flights of stairs and a car full of groceries stuffed into paper bags.
I realize my family’s weekly grocery money is small potatoes, but I didn’t want to abandon your otherwise fine community without pointing out just how stupid, pointless and counterproductive your display of anti-plastic virtue signaling truly is.
According to your website, your goal is to “limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, preserve the oceans, protect wildlife, and reduce the amount of trash that ends up on the streets and in landfills.”
Congratulations! By your own standards, you’ve already failed.
Setting aside the whole “Ho, Ho, Hey, Hey, How Many Trees Have You Killed Today?” aspect, producing and shipping paper bags actually creates more CO2 than the plastic bags you’ve banned. As environmental journalist Marc Gunther reports: “A thorough life cycle analysis done in the U.K. by the government’s environment agency … found plastic bags are superior to paper because they require less energy and far less water to make.”
But what about the oceans, you ask? A 2015 study in Science magazine estimated that the U.S. dumps less than 1 percent of the plastics that end up in the ocean. That “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” that’s “twice the size of Texas!” the Wakefield greenies were whining about? It’s a myth.
According to a University of Oregon study, the “patch” is actually less than 1 percent the geographic size of Texas.
Protecting wildlife? Greenpeace senior biologist David Santillo told the Times of London that it’s “very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite.”
Trash in the streets? In 2009, the “Keep America Beautiful” survey found that all plastic bags combined account for just 0.6 percent of visible litter nationwide.
Now on the landfills — you got me. That’s where the vast majority of plastic bags end up, often after their lifespan as grocery bag/lunch bag/trash bag/ smelly diaper bag/“bag of other plastic bags.” But so what? That’s what landfills are for, and according to liberal Slate.com, we have enough landfill capacity to last hundreds of years.
But this was never about facts, was it? It’s about feeling like you’ve done something — even something completely useless. OK. I get it.
All I can say is “Goodbye, Wakefield” and “Hello, Woburn!”