Thanks

Nice to see an article written by someone that actually understands how plastic bags impact the environment. We are a plastic bag manufacturer in Seattle, and have seen our sales dropping lately. Seattle's mayor wants to impose a tax on all disposable bags, and another city just north of Seattle just banned plastic bags completely. The justification has generally centered around litter reduction and a vague "protect the environment" stance. I suspect that the real motivation has less to do with the environment and more to do with tax revenue. When will a politician do the right thing instead of the popular thing? I've tried to get into the debate with the politicians and citizens that are pushing for bans. I have Google Alerts set to send me news stories about plastic bags, and make sure that I chime in on the comments section if I have time. The roadblock I keep running into is the distrust of my opinion, since I work at a bag manufacturer. We're being compared to big tobacco, which is just nuts. Here at American Plastic, we have been manufacturing 100% biodegradable bags for several years, and sales of those are steadily going up. My fear is that with all the various new biodegradable options, consumers will be more careless with packaging - figuring that since it will biodegrade, it's ok to litter. And many people don't understand the differences between different types of biodegradable bags.

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