Taxing plastic bags is a good idea. It works. This BBC report indicates that Northern Ireland's beaches are the most litter free and are getting cleaner, with the lowest density of litter per kilometre. English seasides had the highest levels of litter. Read the full report...If everyone took cloth bags with them, all the beaches in the world would be cleaner. They aren't expensive. See how affordable they are in my bags section www.badlani.com/bags/ More...

Plastic bags don’t have a very long history. What looked like a miracle of convenience from its conception in 1957 until the late 1990s, has now turned into a monster that threatens life on earth as we know it.Here’s the chronological story of this tragedy unfolding. Who could have imagined this?1957: The first baggies and sandwich bags on a roll are introduced.1958: Poly dry cleaning bags compete with traditional brown paper. 1966: Plastic bag use in bread packaging takes over 25 to 30 perce...

Most North Americans urinate plastics. Sperm counts are at a historic per capita low. Cancer is an epidemic.Shouldn’t plastic bags be made to carry this mandatory warning? There are no safe plastics; all plastics migrate toxins into whatever they contact at all times.Tax the bags, say Californians Against Waste. And I completely agree. It works. Ireland taxed 'em just 12 cents and usage fell 90% in one year. How's that for effective?There is a proposal to tax grocery shoppers of San Francisco...

Time was when we all worried about it, the Irish, the Scots, the South Africans, the Australians, us Indians… but the Americans didn’t.Everyone else’s worrying and all the clean-up action lost meaning because it’s the Americans who consume most of the stuff on earth, and use – and throw away the most plastic bags too. So, seeing this article in Newsday gave me great joy. That’s one thing I love about the Americans. Once they pick up a cause, they run with it with an energy and intensity that ...

They're cheap, easy and everywhere: As many as a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide a year. But would Americans kick their plastic addiction if they had to pay for them? Alaskans call them "tundra ghosts" and "landfill snowbirds." In China, they're "white pollution." South Africans have sarcastically dubbed them their "national flower." Snagged in treetops in Ireland, they become "witches' knickers." The bags are not just a blight, but are wasteful, kill wildlife, pollute oceans and ma...

Because stores in Russia don't give away free plastic shopping bags, that's why. That's why the Irish government imposed a tax on plastic shopping bags and reduced usage 90%. The folks who run our convoluted world can’t accept that there are simple solutions to seemingly complex problems. With one fell swoop we can stop our earth from being choked at the rate of one million plastic bags being thrown away every minute! What do we have to do? Do we need a heavy think tank to figure this one out...

Its nice to know that there are like minded folks out there. I just read a weblog from a guy called Josh Dorfman who runs an online lifestyle company called Vivavi.com. He has concerns about the same things that bother me and I’m going to write to him hoping we can work together in some way soon. Be nice to actually syndicate with a whole bunch of like minded business folk. Read his blog. Its at http://vivavi.com/Vivavi_Daily.php

I suspect these guys will have a point of view on the kind of world we leave behind for them.The world presently throws away one million plastic bags a minute. I don’t think these guys will appreciate a world where barren landfills full of plastic prevent any living thing from growing. Fortunately, some people are thinking about this problem. More...

I recently spent a weekend at a tiny beach called Kelva where my friends Rumy and Shernaz Shroff have a place on the beach. Delightful hosts. I love being invited.To get there you drive upto a place called Manor on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway and then turn off for Palghar. The road takes you through some ghats (beautiful but you get dizzy with the winding road if you’re not driving) and then takes you onwards to a little village called Kelva which is bang on what used to be a beautiful beach...

Outside the Western Alaska village of Emmonak, white plastic shopping bags used to start appearing 15 miles from town. They blew out of the dump and rolled across the tundra like tumbleweeds. In Galena, they snagged in the trees and drifted into the Yukon River. Outside Kotlik, on the Yukon Delta, bags were found tangled around salmon and seals. No more. All three villages banned the bags."It's working out good here," said Peter Captain Sr., chief of the tribal council in Galena, where the ci...

British shoppers get though eight billion a year, but elsewhere the humble plastic bag has become a menace, with one country even banning them outright. Could the UK follow suit? Supermarket shopping in Ireland is much the same as anywhere in Europe, or indeed the rest of the world. But one element British shoppers would find distinctly foreign is the need to pay for plastic bags at the checkout. Since the beginning of March, supermarkets have been forced to charge shoppers a 15c (9p) tax on...

More litter was left on Britain's beaches in 2003 than in any other year, according to a new survey by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) says a BBC report. Plastic bags made up 50% of the litter found with 5,831 collected. The MCS want a big reduction in the amount of plastic packaging used on items and would like the government to bring in tax on plastic bags. The Australians are achieving a lot even without a tax like the Irish have done. On a voluntary basis they seem to be moving peop...

Karama Neil, a lovely lady from Little Rock, Arkansas, wrote a blog about the harm plastic bags are doing and mentioned my blog as being a good reference source. Thank you, Karama. It’s nice to be acknowledged, particularly by a person as accomplished as you. Karama's weblog is at http://sowhatcanido.blogspot.com/2005/04/say-no-to-plastic-grocery-bags.html What a great concept “So what can I do?” I disagree about paper bags, though. Cutting down a tree that takes years to grow, lugging it t...

Mary O'Keefe from Pompano Beach just wrote an article in the Sun-Sentinel in which she mentioned how she initially though California’s proposed 17 cent tax on plastic bags was ridiculous and a burden on the consumer. But she quickly changed her mind. Here’s what she says.“Then I went to my local grocery store and again came home with numerous plastic bags. Several bundles had two and three bags for one item that was not breakable nor particularly heavy,” “I have changed my position. The one d...

Martin Sloan, writing in The Birmingham News, has just written a great piece “Reusable Bags could catch on”. One look at this picture and you can see why they have to catch on!He quotes folks who have appreciated the need to use reusable fabric bags instead of choking our world with plastic bags. More power to you, Martin. Folks like you will save our planet, despite the myopia that most of the world still demonstrates.See how attractive and economical reusable fabric bags can be at www.bad...