RTM is exactly as stupid as most of us supposed

A moronic solution to a non-existant problem

Plastic bag ban passed at last night's meeting

The only blessing is that the proposed charge of 25-cents for paper bag replacements was shelved, for now.

This is virtue signaling at its worst. A number of readers invited me to post on this topic a couple of weeks ago and I intended to do so, but I've written about it so frequently in the past that I guess I'm just tired out on the subject.

Without bothering to look up the links again, here are the facts: plastic bags require one-one-hundredth of the energy to produce a reusable bag. Reusables wear out long before 100 uses, so the cycle begins anew.

Reusable bags, if unwashed, are so germ-ridden that they far surpass the kitchen sponge, until now the champion of filth in the household. If a bag is washed, the energy consumed by generating hot water doubles that 100-to-one ratio between plastic bags and reusables.  Most people don't wash those bags, though: cashiers at Whole Foods and Trader Joes tell me that they refuse to touch the inside of a lot of them, they're so groty and disgusting.

its there really a litter problem in Greenwich caused by plastic bags? No, because most of us have the self-respect and pride not to throw our garbage on the streets.  Sad stories of sea turtles choking on plastic bags notwithstanding, that's a problem that isn't the fault of Greenwich residents.

A landfill trench 30 miles long and six miles wide could accommodate all of the residential trash of the entire United States for 100 years. That sounds like a big trench, but anyone who's ever flown across the country will know that there's plenty of space to accommodate thousands of such trenches: we are not running out of landfill sites. Modern landfills are designed to be anaerobic, by the way, so paper or plastic, the stuff's going to be there a long time.

I have no objection to using reusable grocery bags: I have several myself, because they're far stronger than the flimsy throwaways, and carry heavy objects, like gallon jugs of whiskey and shop-lifted radios without danger of breaking. What I do object to is the Pussyhat Campaign imposing its virtue signaling program on the RTM and, through them, all town residents. I warned here that these people would bring politics into our RTM, and this is just the opening salvo in their campaign to do just that.

Phooey.