To the editor: Each throughout the pandemic and once more extra just lately whereas recuperating from surgical procedure, I’ve needed to depend on supply service for my groceries, which resulted in my accruing of these thick plastic baggage. (“Yes, California must ban plastic grocery bags — again,” editorial, Aug. 5)
As your editorial accurately factors out, I couldn’t simply toss them into the recycling bin (it could be pointless for me to take action), and I couldn’t reuse them on the retailer, as a result of supply necessitates new baggage for each order.
What I did with the pandemic-era baggage — and what I’ll do with my newest inventory as soon as I’m out and about once more — is donate them to a neighborhood meals financial institution. They’re at all times in want of luggage, and people who depend upon meals banks are in all probability extra more likely to reuse them many occasions earlier than they turn out to be unusable (such is the mindset of anybody compelled to make do with fewer sources).
I might urge everybody who has a pile of those thick plastic baggage to do likewise. Recycling is necessary, and so is reusing, however too usually we neglect about repurposing.
Kymberleigh Richards, Van Nuys
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To the editor: Thanks for highlighting the absurdity of our current insurance policies on “recyclable plastic baggage.”
How did the minor element that the brand new, thicker baggage should not in reality recyclable ever get ignored by the lawmakers who enacted California’s ban in 2016? Add to that the truth that shoppers are charged 10 cents per bag, which we have been led to consider went to assist recycling efforts. As an alternative, the cash is revenue for the sellers.
It’s incompetence or collusion, with the one winners being the plastic producers and the margin-starved grocery shops. Preserve the highlight brilliant on this drawback.
Karen Galas, Palos Verdes Estates
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To the editor: California handed a single-use plastic grocery bag ban in 2016, however loopholes have wasted eight years of environmental progress. Plastic baggage nonetheless dangerously float round our highways on windy days, on our seashores and all over the place else.
We’d like the California Legislature to cross Meeting Invoice 2236 and Senate Invoice 1053, an identical payments that may require shops to supply solely paper baggage made out of a minimal of fifty% recycled materials. We handed that 2016 single-use plastic bag ban for good purpose, however the state nonetheless wants to deal with sustainability points.
Let’s hope our lawmakers transfer ahead with our environmental requirements that preserve California stunning and our landfills much less clogged.
Jonathan Gentle, Laguna Niguel
