while walking around your colony you noticed discarded plastic bags all over the place. write a letter to the editor of a national daily pointing out its hazardous effects and the needs to ban plastic.
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Answer:
To the Editor:
I encourage Bar Harbor residents to participate in the town’s public hearing on a proposed ordinance to ban single use plastic bags and polystyrene containers, 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 15 in the Town Hall. I enthusiastically support the ordinance and hope other residents will get behind the initiative.
How these single-use, polyethylene, blown-film-extrusion, t-shirt style bags came to dominate the market is an interesting story. They were the brainchild of the Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin, who came up with the design in the 1960s just as plastics were infiltrating every corner of our lives. Georgia’s Dixie Bag Company got a hold of the patent in 1977. The Kroeger and Safeway supermarket chains introduced the bags in 1982, but it took the petrochemical lobby and the American Progressive Bag Alliance a decade to convince consumers to abandon paper for plastic.
Admittedly, the bags in question are good at what they were designed to do. They’re also cheap and we’ve come up with some other ways to use them, although the claim that they make good emergency windbreakers seems far-fetched. Their very design is what makes them particularly problematic for a community like ours. Airy and with handles, they travel well in the wind and get caught in everything from tree limbs to whale baleen.
Let’s follow the lead of Southwest Harbor and listen to the voices of the students from our island who have so creatively and persuasively encouraged us to drop our single-use plastic bag habit.
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