First of all, they’ll save the earth by giving you a free (free!) water-saving kit on Friday from 11am to 2pm in front of City Hall. Actually, they do this all the time but you usually have to go into the Utility Billing Office to pick up your Self Cleaning Massaging Showerhead and Maintenance Free Toilet Tank Displacement Bag and Roll of Extra Heavy Duty Teflon Tape. Basically, the kit is a collection of low-flow aerators and gadgets that help you detect and measure leaks in your fixtures, which the City just out and gives you. Isn’t that nice?
On another level of government, a likely more contentious proposal is floating around, kind of like a stray plastic bag in an intermittent breeze. Keep reading below.
It seems that legislative types in Richmond are considering a ban on plastic bags, or (in a softer proposal) at least to make them easier to recycle and a tiny bit harder to acquire—i.e., they’d cost a nickel. The proposals have an interesting origin. As the Washington Post reports, it wasn’t that good-hearted people felt sorry for bag-strangled fish and got the idea going. No, it was that cotton growers in eastern Virginia grew tired of having their equipment damaged by wayward bags, formed a coalition and did some lobbying. Voila! See what pissed-off business owners can do?
Well, they haven’t quite done it yet, and as the WaPo points out, their path is strewn with the corpses of similar measures proposed and voted down in other localities. But there’s a chance.
The "ban" proposal is about replacing flimsy bags with sturdier, reusable ones—which means people actually need to reuse bags for the idea to result in less, rather than more, waste.
What do you think, readers? Is a plastic-bag ban in Virginia a good idea, or unwelcome government meddling? How would you vote if you were in the General Assembly?
