My friend, I think towns and cities shouldn’t have personal motor vehicles at all.
Then you don’t need the take out bag at all, you just eat it in the restaurant, or bring your own bag from home, or consignment like cans and bottles.
I’m more concerned about the implementation of the 15¢ paper bag charge. It feels like green washing to me, and i think the administration of the charge will likely net very little out of the fee to put towards other projects. But that’s just a feeling, there’s no data supporting it.
Do retailers pay the fee when they buy the bags in bulk? Do they reimburse the municipality for each bag sold? What about spillage/bad bags? Is this fee specifically being set close enough to plastic so people return to those?
Regardless, the problem isn’t actually the bag (not even the plastic ones) the problem is that they are only used once. A nominal fee is unlikely to change that. A consignment fee is more likely to change it (worked pretty well for cans and bottles).
My friend, I think towns and cities shouldn’t have personal motor vehicles at all.
It’s a radical take that has no political legs, but if you replaced every car seat with a bus seat in a major city it would just be awesome. No traffic, and no wait times (including unnecessary stops) because that’s a lot of buses. Not to mention a fraction of the emissions.
Break even for a single bus is like 5 Priuses. So a city that has 500,000 car commuters a day would be carbon neutral to swap them with 100,000 busses.
That’s a lot of bus routes for a city of a million+ people.
Or a town of 20,000 car commuters would be served with 4,000 bus routes. Not bad for a town under 100,000 people.
My friend, I think towns and cities shouldn’t have personal motor vehicles at all.
Then you don’t need the take out bag at all, you just eat it in the restaurant, or bring your own bag from home, or consignment like cans and bottles.
I’m more concerned about the implementation of the 15¢ paper bag charge. It feels like green washing to me, and i think the administration of the charge will likely net very little out of the fee to put towards other projects. But that’s just a feeling, there’s no data supporting it.
Do retailers pay the fee when they buy the bags in bulk? Do they reimburse the municipality for each bag sold? What about spillage/bad bags? Is this fee specifically being set close enough to plastic so people return to those?
Regardless, the problem isn’t actually the bag (not even the plastic ones) the problem is that they are only used once. A nominal fee is unlikely to change that. A consignment fee is more likely to change it (worked pretty well for cans and bottles).
It’s a radical take that has no political legs, but if you replaced every car seat with a bus seat in a major city it would just be awesome. No traffic, and no wait times (including unnecessary stops) because that’s a lot of buses. Not to mention a fraction of the emissions.
A diesel bus runs 20-30 L/100km.
A Toyota Prius runs 5 L/100km.
Average car occupancy is 1.2 people.
Break even for a single bus is like 5 Priuses. So a city that has 500,000 car commuters a day would be carbon neutral to swap them with 100,000 busses.
That’s a lot of bus routes for a city of a million+ people.
Or a town of 20,000 car commuters would be served with 4,000 bus routes. Not bad for a town under 100,000 people.
Thank you for doing the math!