Education, not fee, is the answer for shopping bags
It is not surprising that the proposal to charge twenty-five cents a bag for plastic and paper shopping bags ran into a storm of opposition in the City Council because of the burden the surcharge would place on poor and elderly shoppers in Baltimore ("A united cry of 'no' to shopping bag fee," June 17). Nevertheless, the catastrophe that both plastic and paper bags pose to the world's environment is huge, and people all over the world are seeking solutions.
Paper bags use more energy and water to produce and cause more pollution than plastic bags, but plastic bags account for 10 percent of the debris on the United States coastline. Non-biodegradable plastic bags are dumped into the oceans, where they create huge dead zones. Animals ingest them, thinking that they are food, and die. An astonishing 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year. Many countries, including China, have already banned them.
The answer is to educate people about the serious damage that disposable bags cause, and to put reusable bags into the hands of those who may not be able to afford them.
With that in mind, members of the St. George's Garden Club in Baltimore took a PowerPoint presentation created by a science teacher in Chicago and adapted for local use, to fourth and fifth grade students in city and county public schools. Many of those students were underprivileged. The presentation highlighted the damage that plastic bags do to the worldwide environment and offered ways we, here in Baltimore, can join hands with people all over the world to contribute to the solution.
M&T Bank donated the nearly 5,000 bags that the club distributed free of charge to those students during Earth Week in April. The fourth and fifth graders competed for a day of play at M&T Bank Stadium by writing compositions telling what they had learned and how they planned to encourage their own families to use the free, reusable bags. The program was a great success, and the club plans to repeat it next year with the help of the bank. Efforts such as these will contribute to solving the problem of disposable bags without posing an undue burden on those least able to pay.
Sheila K. Riggs, BaltimoreThe writer is chairman of the conservation committee of the St. George's Garden Club
Bag tax is the only way to change behavior
