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sabotabbyHere in Hogtown, we've had a 5-cent fee on plastic bags for a number of years. People whined and moaned about it when it was first introduced, but I think it works pretty well. It's not ideal—the money goes back into the hands of grocery stores, not to environmental initiatives—but in terms of reducing the amount of plastic bags ending up in landfills or avian intestines? It does that.
The objections are usually: "Well, I reuse them for garbage bags/cat litter/dog poop," which, yes, I do too. But amazingly, those little bags you put fruits and vegetables in? Are not subject to the fee. Those work just as well for animal poop. As for garbage bags, just how many do you need? A big box of garbage bags lasts awhile. Before the fee, I would accumulate far more plastic bags than I could ever reuse. Most people, presumably, would throw those out. The real objection is that no one likes to have to remember to bring a reusable bag to the grocery store. Except—it's not really hard to remember that. I have a small reusable bag that I carry around with me at all times and that fits nicely in my purse, and a collection of totes for more major shopping. It's not an inconvenience, I end up with less household waste overall, and in all the years we've had the bag fee, I've never once needed to pay it.
The real value in the bag fee, though, is making you aware of how much waste you produce. This is a different kind of awareness than, "Hey, it's Earth Day, let's think about the environment for a sec." This is about the cost of things—how much does plastic cost to make, how much does plastic cost to dispose of—and dinging you where you feel it every time you create unnecessary garbage. I notice, at the checkout, that people who forget their reusable bags get a bit embarrassed sometimes. It becomes frowned-upon to buy a bag. It's a tax on being absent-minded.
In other words, it's social engineering, which is one of those terms that the right likes to throw around and the left ought to reclaim. Individual consumer choices are meaningless. To be honest, I carried a reusable bag long before the ban, because, well, I'm not that lazy, and I'm not an asshole. But that's a drop in the bucket. Changing social behaviours is actually useful, and we should be looking into that.
It caused great enjoyment among many here when the Honourable Wife-Beater tried to rescind the plastic bag fee and ended up getting plastic bags banned altogether in Toronto. Of course, he blames "the people"—you know, the ones he was supposedly elected to represent—and is basically being a big baby about it. But it suggests to me that "the people" don't actually mind social engineering, or carrying reusable bags around. It's a minor inconvenience at first that leads to better behaviour. It works. (I'm not sure that an outright ban works all that well—like I said, these things have their uses. A 5-cent fee was enough to deter those who didn't really need them while allowing those who did a choice. The correct decision would be to keep the fee but make the stores donate the money to local environmental programs.)
On a similar line, I actually agree with New York's proposed municipal ban on super-sized pops. I think the "obesity epidemic" is largely created by the media and body-shaming is fascist, but I also think that ingesting huge amounts of sugary pop is bad for you, regardless of whether it makes you fat. This, too, is being called social engineering.
But! You know what else is social engineering? The fact that these portions exist in the first place. They don't exist in nature. When I was a kid, pop cans were much smaller. I could drink a whole one. Then came a larger size, because the cola companies wanted more profit. I couldn't drink one of the new ones, and there was always a bit left. But I eventually learned to consume greater and greater amounts until I could finish a whole one. I was robbed of the choice of having less sugary pop, far more than New Yorkers will be robbed of the choice to have more (after all, they can always just buy two of the smaller size!).
So why is it that we accept without blinking social engineering on the part of corporations, and balk at social engineering on the part of the state? Shouldn't we be judging these things on their effectiveness in promoting environmental stewardship, or healthy choices, or whatever they're geared towards promoting?
On a related note, this article about Home Ec is kind of neat. We do have the equivalent in high schools here, but of course it isn't mandatory and only girls take it. I'd love to see more hospitality and home economics courses, especially if it replaces the failed cafeteria model for student lunches.
The objections are usually: "Well, I reuse them for garbage bags/cat litter/dog poop," which, yes, I do too. But amazingly, those little bags you put fruits and vegetables in? Are not subject to the fee. Those work just as well for animal poop. As for garbage bags, just how many do you need? A big box of garbage bags lasts awhile. Before the fee, I would accumulate far more plastic bags than I could ever reuse. Most people, presumably, would throw those out. The real objection is that no one likes to have to remember to bring a reusable bag to the grocery store. Except—it's not really hard to remember that. I have a small reusable bag that I carry around with me at all times and that fits nicely in my purse, and a collection of totes for more major shopping. It's not an inconvenience, I end up with less household waste overall, and in all the years we've had the bag fee, I've never once needed to pay it.
The real value in the bag fee, though, is making you aware of how much waste you produce. This is a different kind of awareness than, "Hey, it's Earth Day, let's think about the environment for a sec." This is about the cost of things—how much does plastic cost to make, how much does plastic cost to dispose of—and dinging you where you feel it every time you create unnecessary garbage. I notice, at the checkout, that people who forget their reusable bags get a bit embarrassed sometimes. It becomes frowned-upon to buy a bag. It's a tax on being absent-minded.
In other words, it's social engineering, which is one of those terms that the right likes to throw around and the left ought to reclaim. Individual consumer choices are meaningless. To be honest, I carried a reusable bag long before the ban, because, well, I'm not that lazy, and I'm not an asshole. But that's a drop in the bucket. Changing social behaviours is actually useful, and we should be looking into that.
It caused great enjoyment among many here when the Honourable Wife-Beater tried to rescind the plastic bag fee and ended up getting plastic bags banned altogether in Toronto. Of course, he blames "the people"—you know, the ones he was supposedly elected to represent—and is basically being a big baby about it. But it suggests to me that "the people" don't actually mind social engineering, or carrying reusable bags around. It's a minor inconvenience at first that leads to better behaviour. It works. (I'm not sure that an outright ban works all that well—like I said, these things have their uses. A 5-cent fee was enough to deter those who didn't really need them while allowing those who did a choice. The correct decision would be to keep the fee but make the stores donate the money to local environmental programs.)
On a similar line, I actually agree with New York's proposed municipal ban on super-sized pops. I think the "obesity epidemic" is largely created by the media and body-shaming is fascist, but I also think that ingesting huge amounts of sugary pop is bad for you, regardless of whether it makes you fat. This, too, is being called social engineering.
But! You know what else is social engineering? The fact that these portions exist in the first place. They don't exist in nature. When I was a kid, pop cans were much smaller. I could drink a whole one. Then came a larger size, because the cola companies wanted more profit. I couldn't drink one of the new ones, and there was always a bit left. But I eventually learned to consume greater and greater amounts until I could finish a whole one. I was robbed of the choice of having less sugary pop, far more than New Yorkers will be robbed of the choice to have more (after all, they can always just buy two of the smaller size!).
So why is it that we accept without blinking social engineering on the part of corporations, and balk at social engineering on the part of the state? Shouldn't we be judging these things on their effectiveness in promoting environmental stewardship, or healthy choices, or whatever they're geared towards promoting?
On a related note, this article about Home Ec is kind of neat. We do have the equivalent in high schools here, but of course it isn't mandatory and only girls take it. I'd love to see more hospitality and home economics courses, especially if it replaces the failed cafeteria model for student lunches.
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no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 04:54 pm (UTC)I only did Home Ec/Shop in grades 7 and 8, and even then half of Home Ec was about working with sewing machines (i.e. not the most crucial of basic life skills now) and shop was about working with industrial tools. Even the cooking was done from a paradigm of meat-eating that was irrelevant to me by the time I actually needed to be able to cook for myself. My high school offered Hospitality as a subject, but it really always seemed to be about training kids to work in the fast food industry and no one I knew ever took it. I think a life skills course covering the things you actually need to know to be a functional adult (cooking, personal finance, using the kinds of tools you need for basic home use, etc) would be great. Not sure how it would be fit into high school, but it seems like something around grade 11 when this stuff is becoming more relevant would be great.
Shameless(ly nostalgic) braggadicio
Date: 2012-06-07 06:16 pm (UTC)Meanwhile, the HomeEc piece reminds me of my grade 8 youth, when I endured a year of Shop (except for the 10 classes in a row I skipped before someone at the school noticed the pattern) when I would have much preferred to learn how to cook instead of make plastic keychains.
Anyway, I recall writing an impassioned editorial for the (mimeographed - yes, I'm that old) school paper demanding that Home Ec be opened to boys who might be interested. But it was 1979 and Shop Was For Boys and Home Ec Was For Girls.
Full stop.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 06:49 pm (UTC)And I'm sure I've said that many times before. And I know it's not relevant to anything, really.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 06:51 pm (UTC)Which is why it's played out this way.
I figure if there's a demand for one use bags then stores will provide paper bags instead.
I think most people want government to engineer society. I remember a survey done when the British government were planning to make wearing seat belts mandatory where one of the main reasons people gave for not wearing them was that if it was that important then it would be mandatory.
Which ties down to my summary of the human condition "Thinking is hard, lets go shopping"[1].
Far right wing ideologues want corporations to be in charge of social engineering because they are good at moving money from poor to rich.
Sensible people want government to be in charge of social engineering because they are capable of moving money from rich to poor.
Unfortunately rich people have more money to spend on advertising[4] than poor people do...
[1] Rational thought is very new evolutionry speaking, it takes a lot of energy[2] and we're troop animals so most people want to defer to a troop leader[3]
[2] Conserving energy for when you really need it is an evolutionary advantage.
[3] Troop leaders being the guys who are responsible for using their brains so we don't have to. Which means the troop needs to eat less food than if we all thought for ourselves.
[4] i.e. Acting as troop leaders.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 06:55 pm (UTC)I say they're synecdoches because there's little evidence in either case that bags or sodas are that bad. The case against a bags ban is strong. The bars are cheap, they take almost no energy to make and transport, hardly any materials, and you can reuse them. You will have to use an individual reusable bag hundreds and hundreds of times even if it's one of those cheap nylony things to have it make sense on an energy consumption/carbon emissions budget - if it's cotton, you're just about sunk; a cotton bag is something on the order of a thousand times more resource intensive than a plastic bag. If you reuse the plastic once and buy several cotton bags you'll probably never catch up.
The thing people point to for the bag ban is the Pacific garbage sargasso, but I don't think there's any evidence the plastic bags we use end up there. (Nobody seems to have said where that stuff comes from, but I doubt much of it comes from North America at all.) They end up in landfills, which, well, landsfills are only a problem with respect to groundwater and it's the motor oil and batteries that people throw away that's the problem, not those bags.
The obesity epidemic, first, I think, hardly exists, and second, hasn't been shown to have except in the most extreme cases any effect on long-term mortality and not much on morbidity. So I strongly suspect most of the "problem" that is intended to be solved simply isn't real. If it were real, I don't know that "soda" or even" "sugar" or the dreaded "high fructose corn syrup" as such are the problem. Weight has risen, to the extent it has risen, with the steady increases in sheer calories we eat. Food is just cheap and easily available; all the rest of it, food deserts and the rest, is weak-sauce science. How to regulate eating - well, it's probably impossible. We're driven to eat. But we find fat a hateful and ever present reminder of a lost sense of bodily integrity. So we make a symbolic gesture, to "remind" people.
Meanwhile you can still smoke, and we know absolutely for dead certain that kills 400,000 Americans every year. Smoking should not be legal.
What this really is about is the state saying "we need to remind you to make what we think are good choices," and, even though it makes me sound like a Limbaughesque nutter, "nanny state" is the perfect term for it. It's simply annoying and intrusive. If something criminally infringes on another person's right to be safe and unharmed, or if a behavior is horiffically deadly and socially costly, we ought to simply make the political choice to criminalize it. This is my Kantian side speaking.
Ultimately both bans are about our need, our desire, to control what we are currently unable or unwilling to control - the destruction of the plantary environment through human activity and (what seems to us) the steady erosion of our own health and bodily autonomy from industrial pollution and a poor diet. In the first case, it's all irrelevant unless we impose real limits on carbon emssions, overfishing, and habitat destruction. In the second, we have to improve (to the extent we can) our farming practices and set about removing certain solvents, hydrocarbons, and pesticides from our own habitat. Bags and sods are the political eqivalent of the facebook "poke" function.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 07:54 pm (UTC)Heres an excellent article using sources from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has an entire program devoted to the issue:UPDATE I need to add both the article and NOAA point out the term patch isn't a single giant sargasso of garbage, but clumps gathering in specific current patterns showing an ongoing plastic pollution problem. In that sense, the common image and cliche used to pitch the recycling narrative is wrong, but the underlying problem isn't.
Look I make sweeping statements all the time (like that one), but if one is going to make definitive assertions about nobody knowing anything, a quick google is useful. Especially if one's larger argument is about allegedly ill informed metaphors which misread the situation.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-08 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-08 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 09:15 pm (UTC)1. Its not social engineering-its called capitalism. Supply and demand. Soda companies offered bigger sizes, so people buy them. Thats capitalism.
2. Second, too much soda makes people fat-so WHAT?!? Where does this asshole get off trying to get them outlawed?!? This isnt about helping people, its about a petty dictator billionaire who thinks he knows better than the plebs he rules whats good for them. He's turned nyc into a castrated playground for rich people. I hate that fucker Bloomberg more than words can say. This soda thing is just the latest in a LONG history of him overreaching. Maybe i get it more cause i live in nyc.
But: you on the soda thing=wrong, wrong, WRONG.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 09:37 pm (UTC)1. Its not social engineering-its called capitalism. Supply and demand. Soda companies offered bigger sizes, so people buy them. Thats capitalism.
But but but. That is social engineering. If they don't create large sizes, no one expects sizes to be large, and everyone is content with normal sizes. The companies are the ones creating demand, and the consumers respond accordingly.
Second, too much soda makes people fat-so WHAT?!?
Well, I don't care. But he's not outlawing soda, or even people consuming huge quantities of it. You can still buy as much as you like, no? It's just large containers that are banned.
This isnt about helping people, its about a petty dictator billionaire who thinks he knows better than the plebs he rules whats good for them. He's turned nyc into a castrated playground for rich people. I hate that fucker Bloomberg more than words can say.
I don't blame you, and I'm sure there's a larger context to all of this. Though I think Guiliani did a fair bit to socially cleanse New York as well. They're all assholes. I just don't see how this is interfering with anyone's liberty beyond that of restaurants and pop companies.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 09:57 pm (UTC)It makes me livid that his attitude is "okay, ive made nyc clean and safe for rich people and tourists, now im gonna spend all my time attacking fat people and smokers."
no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 06:34 pm (UTC)Also I have not heard of this big cans of sugary drinks ban, but I imagine it is aimed at protecting children rather than patronising adults (not that personally I have any objection to patronising adults, but as many people do, well, the issue is always one of sugary drinks in big cans being sold at schools and being aimed at children, over here).
no subject
Date: 2012-06-08 01:07 am (UTC)Create a product then create a need in consumers to buy the product.
That's why corporations have marketing and advertising departments.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-08 05:00 am (UTC)True, I don't drink or eat anything with HFCS if I can help it, but I don't think NutraSweet is any better for you; in fact, I think it's much worse. It's so much worse that the spin doctors keep changing the name, in fact: it's now going to be called AminoSweet™.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-08 02:25 pm (UTC)Though I don't think it'll make people switch to diet drinks. People who avoid diet drinks avoid them, period, because they can't stand the aftertaste. I will actually drink them as a last resort because I find them less cloying than the sugar kind, but I think taste is a stronger motivator than size.
(And yes, I know they're just as bad for you. But I seldom drink anything other than coffee and tapwater.)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 02:18 pm (UTC)I actually hope that if the rule is passed, it gets more places to serve beverages that don't need sweetening, such as the Celestial Seasoning Zinger teas. Even generally-available unsweetened iced tea would please me, personally.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-08 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-08 02:34 pm (UTC)The bag thing is an easy thing to create a routine around. Depression and narcotics have basically blown my short-term memory to shit, not like my short-term memory or organization skills were even average to begin with. One develops workarounds. My workaround is that, while I can never remember to bring a large tote, if I have a fold-up vinyl bag (approximate retail cost: $1, was given to me for free, has lasted four years so far), I can carry it around in my purse and then I don't have to remember to bring it. Give 'em out when people apply for benefits. It would cost the city pocket change, make them look all environmentalist, and help people without singling them out.
I also feel that everyone, not just people with LD, should get life skills courses. Hilariously, I will likely be teaching one. I'm terrible with that stuff and would probably benefit from taking it myself.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 06:46 pm (UTC)On the other hand, a lot of people simply don't read to their children because they thinking reading is silly, and don't bother with recycling because they don't care, and when Iceland started selling extremely cheap organic food because its owner felt that as a matter of principle it should be affordable and was better for the environment, the company got into difficulties because people wouldn't buy it even when it cost the same or was cheaper because they thought it was "middle classs" to have morals.
So I agree with you but still feel frustration and fury at the dickheads who do have a choice but piss about!
no subject
Date: 2012-06-08 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-08 09:57 pm (UTC)That's an odd use of the word "robbed." If you have 20oz of soda, you can drink anywhere from 0 to 20oz. No one is forcing you to drink all of it.
I think banning or taxing things that are clearly harmful to the environment or clearly harmful to humans is OK, but the evidence that sweetened soda is harmful to humans is inconclusive (in contrast to the evidence that, say, alcohol and tobacco harm humans). So I don't think it should be treated as a vice.
And this particular ban is not even very effective social engineering -- it only applies to places that sell prepared foods (restaurants, which usually offer free refills anyway; delis, sports arenas, and sidewalk food carts), not grocery stores or convenience stores or even newsstands.
(My dog in the hunt: I make my own soda at home with a seltzer bottle, and I sometimes buy soda in restaurants. The restaurants I buy soda from either offer free refills or offer 12oz cans. I drink sugar-free soda, except as a treatment for low blood sugar, in which case sweetened soda can save my life...but 12oz is usually enough.)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 05:14 am (UTC)Agreed!
Canberra has a plastic bag ban, which means you can by a sturdier bag at the check out for 10-20 cents, or bring your own. They still have the little bags for fruit etc for free.
A whole bunch of people I know complained that "I have to buy bin liners now" but I kinda feel that if you are going to use plastic for disposable purposes, then you SHOULD pay for it, because that stuff will be around forever, and someone is going to have to pay to clean it up eventually.
The main thing about moving from a place with a bag ban to a place without is that I have to remember to tell checkout staff that I don't need a bag. I was so used to to pre-empting them as part of my routine, but a few months without having to do it sort of reset my behaviour.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 06:53 pm (UTC)I think that as in olden days people had to remember to take bags to shops it would become second nature in the end, except that people these days don't always have trips out just for shopping, but try to fit it in around everything else, so it is often hard to remember.
At the moment I am so weak and exhausted I can only manage with a rucksack anyway, so am doing ok on cutting down on plastic bags...except I keep finding I have nothing to put the rubbish in!
no subject
Date: 2012-06-10 06:44 pm (UTC)WORD.