Earth Day Pondering
I’m curious to gauge how Hackettstown residents would feel about a plastic bag ban in town? Other towns/cities are starting to do this, Will Hackettstown eventually follow suit... thoughts?
beeznuts I use plastic shopping bags for garbage, travel, organization, packing lunches, picking up dog poop, cleaning baby poop, using as a signal flag and making funky kites. It’s a multitudinous micro recycling program. All things should be as useful. Yet the mastermind authoritarians know better for us.
Leave our bags alone.
Ezra Fitz Plastic bag bans are worse than 6,000,000 or even 60000000000000000000 people killed in the Holocaust! We must NOT take care of our environment! That's Nazism and worse than terrorism and abortion and racism and violence and wearing white after Labor Day, all in one!
Make America Great Again. Just not by cleaning it up!
MAGAMAGAMAGA We banned littering? And you knew about this and didn't say anything? That's like knowing about 9/11 and saying nothing! Banning littering is liberal garbage! No pun intended!
Littering (will) Make America Great Again! LMAGA!
Wendy D Cirinelli No, the person is not funny, seems like he/she forgot to take their meds, ignore the troll.
kb2755 Well, pondering Earth Day is kinda a joke in this day and age.
If we ignore it, it will probably go away.
StrangerDanger 
Pcisnt4me Is there a shortage of landfills some where? For the greenheads who want these feel good bans lets just cut down more trees for paper bags.
Ray Z the animal
gets out the chain saw its time for the return of the paper bag as look at a tree on prospect street
cloth bags would be nice
Caged Animal Right, just like Starbucks using paper straws that go into GIANT plastic cups. Yep save the Earth.
Sam Sadly at a time when it seems we need the idea of earth day more than ever more and more people seem to ignore it.
Indie What difference at this point does it make? The earth will implode in 10 years (or are we back to 12 again?) anyway. Haven't you people been keeping up?
Laurel The lack of education here is absolutely befuddling! I guess we all think that our time on Earth is just ours? What about our next of kin? It's because we've lived in such a disposable society that we're in this mess in the first place.
irun Irun. Nobody is suggesting we destroy the planet. We just want the freedom to use plastic freaking bags. We don’t want to throw them all over the place or strangle dolphins with them. We just want to use them for our limited time on the earth. In a landfill they don’t hurt anybody.
We recycle now more than ever on earth, how is it that we now have too much plastic? We also recycle glass, however less people are using glass because of cost, and thus went to plastic.
Now plastic is bad. Can we carry our groceries in cardboard boxes? Maybe they'll hire delivery boys. Hey what ever happened to the milk man who delivered glass bottles?
And there are no longer any pay phones.
Move on people and stop believing everything you read.
In a landfill they don’t hurt anybody.
Is that because landfills are good for us or because as declared dead zones its OK to make them more more dead! I can see the nuclear waste guys lining up for a piece of that logic pie.
It’s because landfills are necessary for a clean earth. That’s where all those garbage trucks go. Do you think it would be better with decentralized landfills? ( piles of trash in everybody’s backyard) ?
Landfills hurt in general. Should we just keep building more because people don’t want to change? Build more and sacrifice decent land?
I certainly agree about being environmentally conscious, however what would be the alternative from using plastic bags? Paper bags, which would mean cutting down more trees? Wouldn’t that be counterproductive?
Positive The only plastics I think they should ban are those heat sealed packages that everything comes in where you need sharp tools to open them and you still risk slicing your fingers on the edges, and then you can't return the item (if it's wrong/broken) because the package now looks like it got into a cage match with Freddy Krueger.
Mark Mc. Pos; trees are renewable; they eat CO2 to grow and crap oxygen. What’s left biodegrades into fertile earth
Plastic is not renewable; it is recyclable however if you try. Plastic eats oxygen being created and craps many poisons including CO2. What’s left gets ground into infertile Earth, ultimately working its way up to food chain to what future evolutionary results, who knows.
SD, I understand that about trees, that was basically my point. By cutting down more trees, which takes years to fully grow, we are depleting oxygen in the interim. Also, let’s not forget about wildlife that depend on trees.
There must be a better alternative.......
Plastics can be renewable.
http://www.blackwellplastics.com/RenewablePlastics.html
Charles DeLaurentis Actually.....reliance on paper would create more trees. Reliance on plastic creates wells and shale extraction. Where would you rather walk; woods or oil field?
Bioplastics, aka renewables, are .2% of the market and are not usually any more environmentally friendly than fossil based plastics.
Many paper products these days are sustainably produced..they have specific growing/harvesting guidelines (look for the FSC “forest stewardship council” logo) and paper is much easier to recycle and return to other paper products.
Landfills are getting closer to capacity everyday, so there is a shortage. They can also leach toxic substances into the ground, poisoning soil and water.
And aside from the garbage and poop disposal examples, there are many other sustainable choices that can be used instead of plastic bags like paper or cloth/linen.
trees consume much more oxygen than they create in every 24 hour cycle. Yes, in sunlight they take in co2 and emit oxygen but at night the process reverses and it's not an even exchange due to the fact that the rate of oxygen to co2 conversion at night far eclipses the rate of co2 to oxygen conversion during the daylight hours,
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