This article discusses how more places are banning plastic bags or requiring consumers to pay a fee to use disposable bags. These new policies are being instituted in an attempt to reduce litter, pollution, and waste. Washington, D.C. recently instituted a 5 cent levy on paper and plastic bags at grocery stores and businesses that sell food items (the consumer has to pay 5 cents for every bag they use). The collected fees go to a fund for cleaning up D.C.'s Anacostia River. Washington, D.C. is the first in the U.S. to institute this policy, and cities in the U.S. are watching to see how effective D.C.'s program is. There has already seen a reduction in the use of disposable bags in the district. Not everyone is happy about the new policy, but it's effective. I remember reading a Washington Post article that mentioned how people are opting to carry (or, in some instances, juggle) their groceries in their arms because they don't want to pay 5 cents for the bag. The customers grumble about it, but that is one less bag they're using. The new program is definitely making some consumers consider whether they really need a bag.
Some retailers in the U.S. are even offering a credit to consumers that bring in their own reusable bags. For example, Whole Foods takes 5 cents off the total bill for every bag the customer brings in.
There are also cities that have also outright banned plastic bags. In 2007 San Francisco became the first U.S. city to implement the ban. Since then Oakland, Malibu, and parts of North Carolina have done the same. Los Angeles is expected to ban plastic bags in July and charge shoppers 25 cents for a paper or biodegradable bag.
Ireland enacted a nationwide fee of 15 cents per plastic bag in 2002, and the Irish government has reported that their annual plastic bag use has been reduced from an estimated 328 to 21 per person. (Full Story)
A research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara has released a new study that found that openly gay military service members do not cause a disruption. The research group, which has no official position on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", studied foreign militaries that had made the transition to allow openly gay service members. They looked at Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. The report concluded that openly gay members did not undermine morale and did not cause large scale resignations or mass "comings out". There also were no instances of increased harassment after the bans were lifted. In addition, they found that none of the countries had installed separate facilities for gay troops.
The study said that most countries implemented the policy change swiftly (i.e., within a matter of months), and that there was little disruption to the armed services. Pentagon leaders are in favor of a slower transition -- they say repealing a ban on openly gay men and women should take a year or more. The principal author of the study, Nathaniel Frank, said that their study did not look at what happened if the change was implemented gradually because none of the militaries they looked at had tried that. Though their report did cite a 1993 RAND study on the effects of allowing openly gay service members which concluded that "phased-in implementation might allow enemies of the new policy to intentionally create problems to prove the policy unworkable...Any waiting period permits restraining forces to consolidate." (Full Story)
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