Make it plastic, pal...BYOP

Toronto shoppers will start paying 5 cents for throwaway plastic shopping bags starting June 1, Toronto council has confirmed.

And despite a determined industry lobby to block the measure, councillors voted to ban the sale or distribution of bottled water immediately at City Hall and civic centres, where contracts permit, and by 2011 at other city-owned facilities such as arenas and theatres.

The final vote: 30 in favour of the bag and bottle measures, 13 against.

I will refuse to give the Environmental Fundamentalists the satisfaction should this baloney ever reach my neck of the woods. Toronto is just the latest to levy a bag tax (and that’s what it is). Ireland charges the equivalent of 15 cents per bag and gives the money to environmental boondoggle projects. England charges 10 pence per plastic bag.

In the United States, Seattle charges 20 cents for a plastic bag at grocery, drug and convenience stores. Not to be outdone, San Francisco banned plastic bags altogether. As of January 22, there was a push to tax plastic bags across the entire state of California.

FINE…knock yourself out…

Me? I’ll be purchasing 1,000 volume crates of standard plastic grocery bags (MB-T-24TK) at a whopping cost of 3 cents per unit over the internet (unless I decide to get real nasty and form a coalition to purchase them bulk at a lesser cost). Yeah, I'll be paying 3 cents a bag…but the money goes into a private corporation and not in the pocket of some benevolent do-gooder bullsh*t artist.