The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
It is not often that city council deserves praise for doing nothing, but there are times when that particular course of non-action is warranted. The Flin Flon and District Environment Council, along with unaffiliated green-minded citizens, have in the past urged the municipality to ban single-use plastic shopping bags. Why? The most passionately stated reason I've heard spring from the mouths of proponents revolves around the landfill. Drive out to the dump, they say, and you will see dozens, maybe hundreds, of the white totes scattered about. It's hideous! We need to stop it! Yes, stop it indeed. Because if there is one challenge facing Flin Flon right now, it is the unsightliness of our waste disposal grounds. I know that whenever I go to the landfill, I always bring along my camera and tripod. You know, to immortalize the beauty. It's a dump, for heaven's sake! It's supposed to be ugly. It's supposed to smell awful. It is the last refuge of all of the stuff no longer deemed useful to society. A Michelangelo masterpiece it will never be. What about bags scattered within the city? I drive and/or walk around this community every day. I see no plastic bag plague afflicting our streets, nothing to make me stand up and say, "You know what this place needs? Not further economic opportunities or more seniors housing, but a Soviet-style prohibition on paper-thin synthetic sacks." Granted, I do see litter, but certainly nothing exorbitant. It's almost always cigarette butts, chip bags and, in the summer especially, beer bottles and freezie wrappers. Should those items be forbidden? Don't get me wrong. I'm all for holding back as much material as possible from the landfill. But how likely is a bag ban to accomplish this objective? Exhibit A: a bag ban in Ireland actually led to greater consumption of all plastic bags, including a 400 per cent increase in the sale of "kitchen catchers," those smaller, often white garbage bags. It's easy to see why. At my house, there are five garbage cans, four of which utilize plastic shopping bags to temporarily lodge the incoming trash. Without access to those bags, which we store in a handy dispenser, our consumption of much larger, much less environmentally friendly standard garbage bags would skyrocket. Much like every dwelling occupied by humans, our home produces its fair share of refuse. That refuse has to be somehow contained so it can be trucked to the dump. If it's not in a small bag, it's going to be in a big one. And ours is a home that recycles. Imagine how many more bags would be generated by those who refute the three R's, of whom there are many in this community. We also employ reusable cloth bags while shopping, though serious concerns surrounding this practice surfaced in the form of a microbiological study released earlier this year. According to media reports, the study showed that swab-testing by two independent laboratories found unacceptably high levels of bacterial, yeast, mould and coliform counts in the reusable bags. Not a pleasant thought. What is pleasant is knowing that our civic leaders see right through the folly of a shopping bag ban. Not only is it environmentally counterproductive, its implementation and enforcement would eat up valuable municipal resources that could be put to much better use elsewhere. It is worth pointing out, too, that there are much bigger fish for environmentalists to fry. Where were the local voices demanding that the public have access to environmental information on the HBMS tailings pond? It took a Federal Court ruling last spring, not any apparent public outcry, to make that happen. Plastic bag bans are spreading across the globe like a tidal wave. Kudos to council for staying on their surfboards and not plunging into the waters of baseless hysteria. Local Angle runs Fridays.
