Article taken from packagingnews.co.uk 27/05/15
The City of Dallas, and 12 other Texas municipalities, are unlikely to be allowed to proceed with attempts to ban or tax plastic bags.
Texas law prevents cities from prohibiting or restricting the sale or use of a container or package or assessing a fee or deposit on the sale or use of a container or package.
The likely rejection of a plastic bag ban follows the same in New York and Arizona, and Californian town Huntington Beach.
Michael Laurier, chief executive of Symphony Environmental Technologies which supplies d2w controlled-life plastic, said: “Plastic bag bans and taxes are popular with politicians who want to be seen to be “doing something for the environment” but they are unnecessary and counter-productive. Plastic bags are extremely useful, not only for shopping but for a multitude of other domestic uses, and should not be banned or taxed without very good reasons, which do not exist.
“Plastic is attacked on the basis that it can lie or float around for decades if it gets into the open environment, but this will not happen if the bags are made from the new “Controlled-life” plastic, which will harmlessly degrade then biodegrade in the open environment much more quickly than old-fashioned plastic” added Laurier.
“Another reason for the attack on plastic” he continued “is the mistaken idea that thousands of barrels of oil are extracted from the earth to make plastic. In fact the oil is extracted to make fuels, and plastic is made from a by-product which used to be wasted. The same amount would be extracted if plastics did not exist.”
