"Shocking report reveals that 95% of plastic polluting the world's oceans comes from just TEN rivers including the Ganges and Niger"

Note that none of them are in the US.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...

The streets of the United States don't look like the streets of Kenya, with plastic bags blowing everywhere. It's not an Issue here because we have adequate sanitation. Virtually every major store in the US has a recycle box where you can place old bags. Some people, gasp, reuse them as trash bags in their bathroom trashcans or some other place.

In short, it's a non-issue of the sort that busy-body do-gooders whip themselves into a frenzy over. The piles of trash you see in the oceans are primarily from third world countries who have no societal taboo against littering.

I'm looking at you India, China and Africa.

The US takes care of its waste. We don't throw it in the water like many other countries. Why don't you go lecture those that do.
http://www.ibtimes.com/chin...

I live on the ocean, and plastic is a huge issue. But I never see plastic bags.

Calling them "single-use" displays the problem in a nutshell: Those who are opposed to them are the people who use them only once. I save them and use them for all sorts of things.

Free your mind, and the rest will follow. The people wanting to ban these are the ones who've imprisoned themselves.

Let me help you here: The bags are really a non-issue environmentally. Their mass is practically nil. Compare the mass of one bag to the mass of, say, a milk bottle cap. The cap is many times the mass. And there are many many items of plastic in any grocery store purchase. As for clogging the ocean w/ these bags, last year it was reported that nearly all the plastic that ends up in the oceans comes from 5 sources--in India, Thailand (I think), China, and perhaps somewhere else. Not the US, not the UK. A non-issue, but people feel good banning them, so they get banned.

" A non-issue, but people feel good banning them, so they get banned."

IOW, liberalism in action.

> Taking thousands of years to break down,

Pure nonsense.

They might take a long time to decompose if buried in a landfill (though still not "thousands of years"), but in that case, who cares?

In any environment exposed to sunlight, water, and oxygen, they'll break down within a few years at most.

Don't believe me? Take one of these allegedly "indestructible" bags and weight it down with a rock in a sunny spot in your yard. Leave it there for a year or two. It'll disintegrate when you try to pick it up.

> 1,700 tonnes of waste a week

New York generates 13,000 tonnes of garbage every day.

"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." -- John McCarthy

"Why won’t America join the war on plastic bags? Rosa Prince"

We don't war on people just because they are women and plastic, Ms. Prince.

er, no. http://business.financialpo...

They concluded that “both deaths and ER visits spiked as soon as the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, deaths in San Francisco increase by almost 50 per cent, and ER visits increase by a comparable amount. Subsequent bans by other cities in California appear to be associated with similar effects.”

http://www.timescolonist.co...

Why are libs so anti-science?

Excellent links. (I hope the author reads the first one and has her cloth bags tested for e.coli.)

The fact that the author refers to these bags as "single-use" betrays a bias and a lack of imagination. In our household (and the homes of everyone we know), these bags are NEVER single use. We are an active outdoor household and use each bag at least twice if not multiple times. These uses are for things that are not appropriate for cloth bags. If grocery bags are banned where we live, it would result in our buying heavier plastic bags (made by evil corporations, no doubt) that would be, in fact, actual single use bags and would have greater life-cycle costs.