I had the unfortunate experience of having a National Post editorial (see bottom for link) that seems to come out of the 1980s slamming the governments clamp down on wasting plastic pop up on my feed. I didn’t know there were still old school people that thought throwing out extra plastic was a good thing. They of course did not sell it that way but that was the end result.

I actually read the grocery bag excuse that they use them for garbage bags. I haven’t heard that one in over a decade and it was a terrible excuse when I did hear it. A person or family with 10 plus grocery bags can’t use that many garbage bags before their next trip. They’re also small and inconvenient and weren’t designed for that purpose. If they ever did use that many, clearly they have way too much garbage which in itself is a problem.

Complaining about paper straws and point out that they still have a plastic cup. Like it would be better to ban everything rather than just the straw which is something that can be easily replaced. We all know that virtually every straw ends up in the landfill, way better to have a compostable version versus one that lasts for decades or longer.

They brought up some non thinking people that use WalMart delivery services that have collected a huge pile of blue bags without using their brains to solve the problem. Shame on both them and Walmart for giving the I don’t care people ammunition against reusable bags. While the vast majority of bags are reused by in person shopping (the bulk of grocery shoppers) apparently Walmart’s delivery system was a failure.

I reached out to my friend who uses Walmart thinking there was an easy solution. He brings his reusable bins where they unload the groceries into and take back their bags for use the next time. He has been using Walmart for years and hasn’t amassed any of their reusable bags the entire time.

Think about it, there were easy solutions readily available and this couple just sat there amassing more and more bags, then contacted the media. I would have solved that issue on the second delivery.

I’ve been using reusable bags before people even really knew what they were and I have used them all more than enough times to justify their manufacturing. Single-use plastic bags do have some moments but massive shopping trips is not one of them.

Single-use plastics need to be clamped down on because people are wasteful, that’s just reality. Humans aren’t good long-term thinkers, it’s important we phase out wasteful behavior like over using single-use plastic and styrofoam.

Plastic can be very useful and is important to our materialistic oriented society. Wasting plastic and our landfill space unnecessarily will always be a fail.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/raymond-j-de-souza-summers-over-but-the-liberals-climate-theatrics-continue