Tax This:, Plastic Bags

Not sure if it is that I like the idea of the tax or I just am sick and tired of a house littered with plastic grocery bags. Going ot Harvest Market or Payless and see how they go nuts with the plastic bags. Does a gallon of milk need a plastic bag when it has its own handle? I write all this in the sense of full disclosure about why I am posting about The New York Times' With Irish Tax, Plastic Bags Go the Way of the Snakes .

"In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts."

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Drowning in a sea of plastic bags, countries from China to Australia, cities from San Francisco to New York have in the past year adopted a flurry of laws and regulations to address the problem, so far with mixed success. The New York City Council, for example, in the face of stiff resistance from business interests, passed a measure requiring only that stores that hand out plastic bags take them back for recycling.

But in the parking lot of a Superquinn Market, Ireland’s largest grocery chain, it is clear that the country is well into the post-plastic-bag era. “I used to get half a dozen with every shop. Now I’d never ever buy one,” said Cathal McKeown, 40, a civil servant carrying two large black cloth bags bearing the bright green Superquinn motto. “If I forgot these, I’d just take the cart of groceries and put them loose in the boot of the car, rather than buy a bag.”