11/17/08 Plastic Bag Tax

How attached are you to those plastic shopping bags that you put your groceries in every week? You may just have to put a price on that attachment sooner rather than later. If you are one of the last people still holding out against purchasing reusable shopping bags your time may soon be up. New York's city officials are calling for a proposition which will charge customers six cents per plastic bag at the check out counter. Voters in the Northwest are already facing the possibility of such a measure next year and several other cities across the nation are seriously entertaining adopting the idea. Europeans have long been users of cloth or mesh shopping bags, and in fact when Ireland adopted a considerably hefty plastic bag tax in 2002 plastic bag use dropped a whopping 94 percent! Whether a plastic bag tax would become a sizeable source of revenue for most cities or whether the nation's shoppers will overwhelmingly embrace reusable shopping bags remains to be seen. The plastic bag tax may just be a win/win situation for both bureaucrats and environmentalists alike.