A Kansas Senate committee made the right move Thursday when it shot down a proposed law that would have banned local governments from banning plastic shopping bags.
And now it’s time for Wichita to step up and show the same kind of common sense and not ban them.
I know that sounds contradictory, but hear me out.
Plastic bags have their place. We’d be ill-served by an outright ban, as some in Wichita are pushing for, while we’d be equally ill-served by the totally hands-off approach contemplated in the late Senate Bill 47.
We need a more nuanced approach.
Nobody could seriously argue that used bags blowing around is not an annoyance at the least and an environmental nightmare at its worst — except possibly the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, the driving force behind SB47.
On my 10-mile drive to work this morning, I counted 16 free-range plastic bags; in trees, blown up against fences, in puddles in the gutter and under the Kellogg freeway overpass.
And like any good citizen, it makes me angry to see that.
But we can’t let that anger overrule our better judgment. An outright ban on bags would be serious overkill — kind of like using a nuclear missile to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon. It might address the immediate problem, but create other, potentially larger problems downstream.
The city of Wichita is, right now, conducting a survey on its Facebook page on what they call single-use plastic bags. But “single use” is a misnomer.
I — and practically everyone else I know — bring groceries home in the free bags from the store and then take out the trash in those same bags.
Take away the take-home bags and you’ll see a corresponding increase in purchases of trash bags that contain more plastic per bag.
Researchers at the University of Georgia took a look at California and found that when take-home bags were banned, sales of four-gallon trash bags increased 55% to 75%, while sales of eight-gallon trash bags increased 87% to 110%. At lower-volume stores, additional sales of four-gallon bags added 30 to 135 pounds of plastic waste per store per month. The sales of eight-gallon trash bags created an additional 37 to 224 pounds.
That script only flipped at big stores that generate at least 326 carryout bags a day.
I can only remember ever once releasing a plastic bag into the wild.
