The anti-plastic bags lunatics .... in California, USA ... Part Two

 David Sims of ThomasNetNews     writes:
 ...According to L.A. resident and filmmaker     Jay Beeber, plastic grocery bags “and other merchandise bags” make up only about 0.3 percent of the waste stream in California. Beeber cites studies showing that “on average, plastic retail bags make up about 1 percent to 2 percent of all litter” across the country.
Okay, one can argue that with these statistics, the pro-baggers have a dog in this fight, but then again, so do groups citing statistics in efforts to get plastic bags banned. Los Angeles County claims that as much as 25 percent of the city’s litter stream is plastic food-takeout bags.



But wait, the Save The Plastic Bag Coalition compared that claim to “litter audits” by other cities and states:
The San Francisco Department of the Environment litter audit conducted before plastic bags were banned in that city showed that plastic retail bags were 0.6 percent of all litter. The Florida figure is 0.72 percent. The Toronto figure is 0.13 percent....
...That “what else” is usually the claim that since plastic bags are made from oil, banning them will reduce our dependence on foreign oil or some such argument made by people who invariably oppose drilling for our own oil here in America to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
“Approximately 12 million barrels of oil go into the U.S. supply of plastic bags,” writes a promotional brochure on zerowaste.lacity.org.

According to plastic bag maker Elkay Plastics, based in Commerce, Calif., which presumably knows about its own business, the plastic resin used in manufacturing our bags “is made from a by-product of natural gas, not oil.”....
....the San Diego Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation — which conduct twice-monthly beach cleanups throughout the county and have successfully completed more than 170 beach cleanups — plastic bags account for 2 percent of the litter cleaned off beaches.
The most commonly encountered trash on the beaches, according to the people out there doing the collecting, are cigarettes and cigarette butts, by far, accounting for 38 percent of all refuse. If one wants to prettify Southern California’s beaches, one should immediately ban smoking on sand.
After that, ban plastic bottle caps; plastic food wrappers; plastic lids, cups and straws; Styrofoam cups and paper products, too, since more of those items are collected than plastic bags. Oh, and ban “Other,” too, while you’re at it, since beach cleaners collect seven times the amount of “Other” items than plastic bags.....

h/t: Tam