Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jeffrey Reel, who is a writer, lecturer and retail manager living in St. Johnsbury. His book of essays, “Uncommon Sense,” is scheduled for publication this summer.
[V]ermont has passed a law banning the use of single-use plastic bags and polystyrene carry-out containers and cups, effective in 2020. In doing so, Vermont joins Hawaii, California and 349 municipalities, including counties, across the United States. Why?
A single-use plastic bag has, on average, a 12-minute lifespan from when it’s initially filled with groceries at the food store to when it is discarded. We discard 100 billion bags annually in the United States. Those same plastic bags will require anywhere from 10 to 1,000 years to decompose depending on where they are disposed/dumped. One trillion bags every 10 years for 12 minutes of use.
Polystyrene (erroneously referred to as Styrofoam, a trademark of Dow Chemical Co.) does not degrade; it breaks up into ever-smaller pieces and enters the food chain. It cannot be recycled. The United States produces three million tons of polystyrene annually. Eighty percent finds its way to landfills while the remaining 20% enters our waterways.
There are those jealously guarding our personal freedoms who take exception to this ban, and I appreciate their intentions. But I have also noticed that those who make the most noise in this regard also, to a man, downplay the significance of climate change. That’s not a coincidence. And I believe they are being somewhat naïve. We live in a complicated world today: 370 million Americans whose lives are inextricably linked in so many respects. Local, state and federal governments have roles to play in limiting the damaging side effects of our 19th- and 20th-century industries, as well as stimulating research and development in 21st clean technologies. Yes, we must remain vigilant against government overreach (stay out of our bedrooms and women’s wombs), but I invoke the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln in this regard: “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities.”
I was a member of the town of Lenox, Massachusetts, environmental committee. Lenox and surrounding towns were, at the time, considering (and eventually instituted) a similar ban on plastic shopping bags and polystyrene containers/cups. The town merchants were understandably pushing back against the change, and those distribution companies that serviced the disposable bag/cup industry threw their weight behind the effort to defeat the initiative. I decided to conduct a survey of merchants in the neighboring town of Great Barrington that had, six months earlier, enacted an identical law. Yes, there had been the expected initial pushback from merchants and some (but few) shoppers. But six months after the law went into effect, the merchants – to a store – expressed appreciation for the ban. Any initial discomfort was due to having to develop new habits. Nothing more. It was never about restricting one’s freedom of choice, although merchants gave voice to that early on: the clarion call of democracy, but really intended to trigger a conditioned reflex, like Pavlov’s bell. Six months into the new regulations and they all saw the sense in that law, as did the shoppers. The same eventually proved true for Lenox. The same will prove true for Vermont.
