Saturday, June 09, 2012

Spiting Rob Ford: ur doin it wrong

Dear Toronto City Council:

I totally get wanting to stick it to Rob Ford. I'm no fan of the man myself. He came into work early on his very first day to cancel Transit City, which (as I explained to him in email shortly after his election) would hurt me more than any other government policy enacted in my lifetime. With that action, he lost any further benefit of the doubt I might have given him, and, before we even get into policy quality, I'm not above enjoying a little flicker of schadenfreude every time he's defeated.

However, by banning plastic bags in Toronto, you've just ensured his next election victory.

What you've done is introduced an inconvenience that people will notice every day, and that Ford opposed. Every single time someone ends up buying more groceries than they planned for; every single time someone opens the hall closet and their stash of those bulky annoying "reusable" bags that it's never actually convenient to use falls on their head; every single time someone needs to get shoes repaired, go to the farmer's market and buy clothes all in one trip; every single time someone runs out of garbage bags because they keep forgetting to buy garbage bags because they've never had to buy garbage bags before in their life because their grocery bags have always done the job, this irritant you've introduced will come up and slap them in the face.

As we know, Ford appeals to voters who don't closely follow the details of municipal politics, who don't have (or don't care to have) a broader view and are more likely to vote on things that affect them personally and directly. We saw this in the last election, with people swayed by groundless claims that a subway could be built quickly and cheaply, or by the prospect of saving a measly $60 a year on vehicle registration tax (an amount so negligible that they wouldn't even notice if $60 were pickpocketed from their wallet over the course of a year.) If spin and catchphrases and negligible cost savings could win him an election, imagine what a tangible daily irritant will do!

There are many things you could do to spite Rob Ford that will also make life easier and more fun for Torontonians. You could restore the library and bus services that were cut. You could build more bike lanes. You could extend Pride funding. You could build all of Transit City in its original form.

Or you could solve this whole plastic bag debacle by requiring stores to give away biodegradable plastic bags. As I've blogged about many many many many many times before, biodegradable bags would make environmentally optimal behaviour effortless. You don't have to remember to bring your reusable bags, you don't have to remember to buy garbage bags. You just go to a store and buy stuff without thinking about bags, and they give you a biodegradable bag. Then, when you get home, you reach for the nearest plastic bag to use for garbage, and it's biodegradable. You'd have to go out of your way to put plastic into the landfill. And, as an added bonus, it would spite Rob Ford because he's not so very into the City telling businesses how they can do business. You could also do so by extending the organic waste collection program to highrises, which will spite Rob Ford by costing money to implement, and do way more to address your ostensible goal of reducing the amount of waste that goes to landfills than a plastic bag ban would.

3 comments:

CQ said...

I hate biodegradable plastic bags. Occasionally I recall getting a few from Chapters.
Months later, I go to get a plastic bag and I find something with jagged holes. (Mice problem?, nope).
Then I have to attempt to scoop up all the slick and thin bio-bits as part of the rest of the bag has splintered across the flooring when simply picked up. These pieces, which are still breaking apart, become near impossible to re-gather.
Then I curse the advertised Company whose logo is displayed. And I throw out the other 85% of the plastic biodegradable bag without having once re-used it.

impudent strumpet said...

That's weird, I've never seen that happen. (Haven't shopped at Chapters in like a decade though.) You could vacuum up the bits, that might make it easier. I've accidentally vacuumed up a whole plastic bag before, and it did no harm to the vacuum.

laura k said...

I've never seen that, either. I notice that the compostible bags that we use for organics will leak and will begin to degrade (they seem to dissolve) before they're full. But this is only when there's moisture inside them, not when just sitting around unused.